Jamelle, covering Netroots Nation at The American Prospect’s blog, writes:

The Netroots Nation straw poll, conducted during the conference by Revolution Messaging, shows President Obama with an approval rating of 84 percent among the attending activists, journalists, and bloggers. Given the mostly somber mood of the conference, this is higher than I expected, but on reflection, I’m not too surprised. Among conference attendees, there didn’t seem to be much disagreement with the idea that Obama has been pretty successful in advancing a progressive agenda. While I’m sure there was plenty of disappointment over the lack of a public option in the Affordable Care Act, for example, I don’t think anyone challenged the notion that passing health care is a defining achievement for the administration.

Charles Davis attacks:

I particularly like the last line: while sure the president didn’t actually deliver on his promise to enact a public option, much less the single-payer system desired by much of the liberal left, passing something and calling it “health care reform” was certainly an achievement, and shouldn’t we all be proud of that? Absent from the piece, you’ll of course notice, is any mention of all those dead foreigners that liberal cosmopolitans purportedly care about, which I guess might just indicate that they never really cared about them. A civilian killed by a Democratic president in an unjust landwar in Asia just doesn’t inflame a liberal’s passions as much as when it’s a nasty ‘ol Republican dropping the bombs. 

(Via IOZ)

While Jamelle is well-aware how highly I think of him, I am perhaps not surprisingly with Davis on this.  After all, even though I make a pretty crappy representative of libertarianism, I’d make a far crappier representative of liberalism.

But for the moment, let us pretend that I share the generally accepted view amongst liberals that health care reform was good and will in fact save some lives, and that the stimulus package prevented the economy from being even worse, and that any number of other liberal agenda items signed into law in some ostensible manner were net positives. 

How do those accomplishments even remotely outweigh the continued escalation of the War to Force a Few Bad Guys Into Pakistan, with all the civilian deaths inherent therein?  How do they outweigh the continued operation of Guantanamo Bay as a legal Black Hole?  How do they outweigh the absolutely outrageous and indefensible expansion of the warrantless wire tapping program?  How do they outweigh the continuation of raids on medical marijuana dispensaries?  I could go on.

I don’t just mean this in the sense of “how is modest (but expensive) health care reform more important than ending the slaughter-by-video-game of innocents”?  I mean it also in the sense that it is solely within Obama’s power to do or not do every single thing in the above paragraph.  Solely.  As in no one else standing in the way.  As in amongst the specifically enumerated powers of the Presidency. 

How much of the health care reform package was actually written by Obama or someone in his administration?  How much of the stimulus package?  How much of these bills was written by Democrats in Congress?  Indeed, how much of these bills was written by Republicans in Congress? 

Obama did not single-handedly pass health care reform or the stimulus.  Sure, he held a few press conferences, took some photo ops, and made some speeches.  Then again, so did a lot of politicians, albeit with less fanfare.  Nor could he have single-handedly passed these bills.  Why?  Because the President isn’t Congress!  The President doesn’t even get to order his own party in Congress what to do and expect them to just ask “how high?”.  Sure, you can give him some extra credit for having to actually sign the bills into law.  But was there a single Dem candidate for President who wouldn’t have?  Indeed, considering as these were bills that largely passed the Senate with no room to spare, I’m not even sure how Obama’s signature even counts as much more worthy of praise than the vote of the average Senator. 

But maybe Netroots Nation really thinks that the good that was achieved with those press conferences, photo ops, speeches, and eventual entirely predictable signature alone outweighs all the evil that is solely within Obama’s power to stop, or -as in the case of the indefensible expansion of warrantless searches – that was solely within Obama’s power to implement. 

I somehow doubt this is the case. I certainly hope it is not.

Instead, this is just the Cult of the Presidency at its most obvious.  While I can’t find good numbers on what Netroots Nation thinks of the Dem-controlled Congress, Congress’ overall approval ratings are abysmally low enough that it’s probably safe to say that Netroots Nation doesn’t think nearly as highly of Congress as it thinks of the President.  Even though Congress has about $*%#-all to do with any of the horrific acts or failures to act I mentioned above.

The President, because we have made him an elected God in our minds, gets full credit for every single thing that happens during his reign that pleases those nominally on his team (also known as “those who believe God is good”), and little of the blame for that which does not, even if he is the sole force behind that evil.  Meanwhile, everything he does that causes good for the other team (also known as ”those who believe God is evil”) gets ignored or minimized and everything that happens – whether or not he has much power over it – gets blamed on him.

Let’s call this an open thread.

Happy Friday!

I was remiss in my last music post. Several readers pointed out that The National’s Bloodbuzz Ohio is an excellent tune and should have been included. Well here it is:

Some great lyrics in this one. I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees.

And if you missed it, this now-aging but still-worth-the-read post by Matt Feeney on the latest National album, High Violet.

(UPDATED)

I’d strongly advise against this course of action.  It is certainly true that what Breitbart did was wrong and blatantly misleading.  To the average person lacking a preexisting loyalty to Breitbart, the defenses Breitbart has raised have come across as hollow and implausible, or at least woefully poor excuses that amount to an admission of extraordinary recklessness.  And I have no idea what kind of distress Ms. Sherrod may or may not be experiencing as a result of all this, regardless of the fact that this incident will open up plenty of opportunities for her to make her government salary many times over in our media environment.  Certainly, if she is experiencing real and credible death threats as a result of this never-should-have-happened circus, those opportunities may well be woefully inadequate.

But a defamation suit is not the right answer, either.  I don’t say that because I’m a First Amendment absolutist; in fact, as far as defamation suits go, this one will likely be less chilling than most.  I say this because her suit is extraordinarily unlikely to succeed.  I say this because the costs of emotionally-charged litigation, as this would be, go far beyond the money one pays their attorney, and especially if that emotionally-charged litigation turns out unfavorably.  All of this will be exacerbated by the massive public relations battle that will be involved in this fight and the equally unlikely to succeed counterclaims that Breitbart will file in response.  Worse, if and when she fails to obtain a verdict against Breitbart, Breitbart will be able to position himself as a champion of free speech and take to the airwaves to proudly, if wrongly, proclaim that the verdict demonstrates the correctness of his initial allegations. 

And Sherrod’s case will almost certainly fail.  Sherrod was, at the time of her speech and at the time of Breitbart’s post, a government official.  Breitbart’s attacks on her, while morally indefensible, were attacks in her official government capacity rather than attacks on her as a private citizen.  This fact makes the already-high bar for proving a defamation case even higher.  The video Breitbart posted, by itself, is certainly misleading and irresponsible.  But there’s no denying that she told the story that she told.  The story she told is absolutely a legitimate subject for public commentary and reporting, of and by itself, and regardless of whether it was published in full context. 

Although it was only on the basis of that highly misleading video clip that Breitbart was able to credibly call Sherrod a “racist government official,” the accusation of racism is a pure statement of opinion about a government official in their capacity as a government official.  Actually, that’s putting it too mildly – accusations of racism fall within the category of “”name calling, epithets, and abusive language,” which “no matter how vulgar or offensive, are not actionable.”  Ward v. Zelikovsky, 136 N.J. 516 (1994).  At this point, in fact, it is generally the rule that “Accusations of “racism” no longer are “obviously and naturally harmful”. The word has been watered down by overuse, becoming common coin in political discourse.”  Stevens v. Tillman, 855 F.2d 394 (7th Cir. 1988). 

Although there are some instances where an accusation of racism was found to be defamatory, those cases are typically older and in each case the primary reason the accusation was considered actionable seems to be that the topic was found entirely a topic of private concern.  Kimura v. Superior Ct., 230 Cal. App. 3d 1235 (6th A.D. 1991)(noting that “the public concern factor weighs heavily in favor of protecting the speech, and its absence may have influenced [a] decision which found the implied accusations of racism actionable.”).  Criticism, no matter how abhorrent, of Sherrod in her capacity as even a relatively low-level government official is nothing if not a matter of public conern.

It’s simply impossible to see any way that Sherrod could win this suit.  In the meantime, she will have to endure the stress of an emotionally-charged litigation, continuing public scrutiny, and an almost certain upsurge in vitriolic commentary from Breitbart and his supporters.  The one saving grace will be that the suit will be unlikely to survive a motion to dismiss, so at least these stresses will last but a few weeks or months rather than years.  This of course says nothing about the additional stresses that will come if and when the suit is tossed out and Breitbart and his supporters get to celebrate. 

And what if I’m wrong?  What if she somehow wins?  This will mean that in all likelihood the litigation lasts years.  That kind of litigation takes a very real toll on people in an emotionally charged situation.  And what will she have gained?  Breitbart’s supporters will just make him a martyr to speech and will make sure that he doesn’t pay a dime of your damages.  There will be no revenge, and Breitbart’s reputation will be no worse than it already is and will likely be even better amongst his supporters.  If she doesn’t care about the revenge and just wants compensation for her damages, she will be able to do far better simply focusing on maximizing other streams of income (of which I have no doubt there will now be plenty).

UPDATE: Libby Spencer (and how the heck are ya these days, Libby?) suggests Sherrod could also have strong contract claims against Breitbart.  This has little better possibility of success than a defamation claim, though.  Breitbart had no contractual relationship with her, so there’s no contractual duty.  If Libby’s suggesting a claim based on tortious interference with a contractual relationship, the trouble I see is that in the cases of which I’m aware, tortious interference claims based on a defamatory statement require that a plaintiff first establish a defamation claim. 

That said, I just became aware of some case law in Texas holding that “a plaintiff can bring a claim for defamation when discrete facts, literally or substantially true, are published in such a way that they create a substantially false and defamatory impression by omitting material facts or juxtaposing facts in a misleading way.”  Turner v. KTRK TV, 38 SW 3d 103 (2000).  That case explicitly rejected the approach taken by just about every other jurisdiction, but the point is that there is at least one state where Breitbart’s actions would clearly fit within the realm of a defamation claim. 

Still, I can’t imagine Texas being a viable venue for this case, and even if it were, it would remain true that even victory in this case would come at an extraordinarily high cost.

We haven’t done one of these for awhile.  Today seems like as good a day as any.  It’s sometimes easy to forget that a lot of times the most detail-oriented, sober, and incisive pieces of analysis get shut out of the top-tier of the blogosphere, which in turn is quite capable of the worst kinds of pseudo-analysis that makes you wonder who the writer reached that level of regard.  So….

Fester Dave Anderson explores whether legalization and taxation of marijuana can provide a significant source of a state’s revenue that would allow a state to solve its budget problems.  Anderson discusses the clear similarities between wine production and a legalized marijuana industry and concludes that the answer is “no.” 

Darwin Catholic posits a theory for the US’ more or less unique-in-the-West dilemma of rising income inequality.  He suggests that the beginnings of globalization in the aftermath of WWII were uniquely beneficial to the American working class, but that these benefits quickly stagnated once the rest of the developed world recovered from WWII, even as increasing globalization ensured that American skilled and highly educated labor continued to reap the rewards. 

Publius at the Fourth Branch puts Obama’s falling approval ratings in historical context.

Mark’s points about the relationship between American dynamism and immigration are well-taken. Again, I’d like to stress that I’m endorsing an exceedingly mild form restrictionism – perhaps a system that expands immigration quotas for Third World countries not adjacent to our border while limiting the number of new arrivals from Latin America. That said, I think Mark dramatically understates the importance (and fragility) of certain “core American values” (for lack of a less Gingrichian phrase).

The genius of American assimilation is that we’re very good at absorbing and commercializing immigrant cultures’ cosmetic features – witness our shared affection for bastardized Chinese cuisine, Henna tattoos, and globe-trotting pop stars. Among other things, this has the effect of making the United States open and welcoming to newcomers without dramatically altering our most important features. I don’t doubt that there have been dramatic changes in popular culture throughout American history, but I like to think there’s a certain permanence (or at least continuity) among the cultural and social norms that make the United States tick.

What are “core American values?” At the risk of sounding like the “Issues” page on Gingrich2012.com (G-d save us), I think we can tentatively identify certain consistent features that undergird the United States’ success: An entrepreneurial bent, a faith in hard work and meritocracy, a high level of social trust that encourages cohesion, charity, and reasonably efficient government, robust patriotism, and an enduring belief in liberty, equality, and opportunity.

I happen to think that nearly every human being on the planet is born with the faculties to comprehend and embrace this (admittedly ill-defined) value system. But these norms are learned, not innate, and I also think it’s exceedingly naive to assume they’re as easily transmissible as a taste for American popular culture.

One final point: Mark expresses some skepticism of the idea that American values aren’t easily adopted. Conclusive evidence is hard to come by for this sort of thing, but I’ve always thought that the relative absence of liberal democratic capitalism outside the Euro-American core is a telling indicator of how difficult it is for non-Westerners to adopt Western values.

Why wait for Friday night to do a music post? I say let the jukebox play whenever you put another dime in it, baby.

Anyways, I’ve been almost obsessively listening to The National lately. I realize they’ve been around for a while, but I’m hopelessly unhip so I’ve only just stumbled on them.

Here are a few of my faves in no particular order:

I respect the point that Will made last week in his post arguing against open borders and for a sort of mild restrictionism.  Will sums his argument up thusly:

So the West is both successful and difficult to emulate (I suspect this would be true even if we could identify the exact precursors to liberal democratic capitalism). This suggests that the best poverty alleviation program is to let as many people across the border as possible to share the fruits of our historical good fortune. On the other hand, the frailty and complexity of the Western model suggests that a massive influx of foreigners could place an unbearable strain on the social, cultural, and political norms that allow the United States to function. In short, the very complexity that makes us so difficult to emulate also makes it difficult to absorb wave after wave of new arrivals.

There is a lot of surface plausibility to this, particularly if you accept the assumption that the Western model is frail and complex.**  Rapid changes to social, cultural, and political norms arising from a sudden, massive influx of foreigners – especially non-Western foreigners – could certainly pose a threat to a given Western country’s ability to remain a cohesive liberal institution.  Moreover, if the cohesion and comparative liberalism of Scandinavia or the Low Countries or whatever is largely a function of the norms, the sense of nationhood if you will, that have developed over the centuries in those countries, then anything that would tend to dilute that sense of nationhood would be a threat to cohesion and stability.

But I don’t think this line of thinking can really apply to the United States, and particularly with respect to the primary source of immigrants that the US now faces.  Here’s why: [Read more →]

At this point in the book, it’s becoming more evident to me that Chris Hedges is a cultural conservative of a fairly traditionalist bent. Some readers might overlook this because he’s a progressive, but as anyone who’s lived in a black community in America can attest, left-wing politics and traditionalist cultural values can live together quite comfortably. At his core, Hedges is a cultural conservative because he has a sense of what has been lost in the culture and what the cost of that loss has been, even though his own political allegiances don’t require him to gloss over the role of capitalism in that loss. Conversely, he’s not too loyal to the left to point out that left-leaning academics have allowed the humanities to decline on their watch, retreating into a self-enclosed and miasmic world of faddish jargon. [Read more →]

It’s striking that in recent years America has become familiar with a major theme in Euripides: namely, the war that starts after victory is declared. I proposed this as the climate in which Hecuba takes place, but the same is even more evidentially true of Andromache. Here, via Donald Junkins’s translation, the Chorus tells us: “A victory which celebrates dishonor, stains the use of violence in behalf of justice, and creates hate. Malice makes no sense.” In this play, to the victors goes the malice.

We’ll remember Andromache from her three-hankie cameo in the Iliad; Hector, her beloved companion and great Trojan swordsman, had a date to be sliced and diced by Achilles, and she begged him to run away with her in an undeniably moving passage. Sadly though not moving enough for Hector, who dashed off to the battlefield and was struck down soon after. Whatever happened to Andromache?

One might think things couldn’t get much worse for Andromache, but this is Greek tragedy: things can always get worse. [Read more →]

Serves me right… go on vacation, miss a bunch of fun realignment posts.  Anyway, I’m still sorting though and catching up, but I do hope to have some more complete thoughts on the subject soon.  For now, I did want to add some of the ideas from this Sam Smith piece on “the death of liberalism” to the mix.  The piece itself is a few months old – still relevant, if not topical.

What Smith writes about Obama and the Democratic establishment is not particularly interesting; mainly a rehashing of progressive criticism of Democratic candidates throughout all of history (and it sloppily associates mainstream Democrats such as Obama with DLC Democrats like Bill Clinton.)  There are, however, a couple of interesting points in here that make it worth the read:

1)      the criticism of liberal condescension:

Now, not only do [liberals] not serve the greater part of America, they don’t even seem to like it all that much. They offer few policies on its behalf and they scold, ridicule, patronize and insult the very constituency that FDR and LBJ were so successful at reaching. Not too surprisingly, that constituency has gone looking elsewhere for friends.

2)      Ideas for progressives.

On economic issues:

- A return to the 40 hour week established by the New Deal six decades ago…

- A limit on credit card usury, such as a return to the sub-10% levels of the 1980s.

- Court-supervised restructuring of mortgages in foreclosure cases.

- A real public works program – such as one aimed as returning our rail system to its late 19th century level – emphasizing jobs and visible improvements to the lives of communities.

- A big growth in support for small business, largely ignored by both major parties.

- A single payer healthcare system.

- Support of community and state banks, cooperatives and other alternatives to the economic institutions that almost destroyed our economy.

On decentralization:

Another key element of a progressive populist politics would be respect for the small. Because the liberal elite has been trained to work in large institutions it has come to think size is the best way to get things done. This bias can be felt strongly in the policies of the Obama administration and in the attacks on any who support the Tenth Amendment that accuses them essentially of being new age states rights segregationists. This is not only factually wrong, it is politically stupid, because people in this country strongly rate their state and local government better than the feds.

As I said, the piece is far from perfect.  For one thing, there’s nothing in his laundry list of issues (listed in the full article, NOT the list above) that suggests this is anything more than doubling down on existing progressive orthodoxy, which is fair, but hard to repackage as the foundation for a new coalition.  But overall, I find the mix of populist economic policies, ceding control to local governments, and (at least) downplaying cultural issues intriguing.

Just to add some more items to Jason’s list of “managed ignorance” in the realm of conservative media:

• The “Mosque at Ground Zero,” which is neither at Ground Zero nor even really a “mosque,” but is still, somehow, worthy of massive coverage and controversy in “Real” America (which, it must be emphasized, does not actually include the overwhelmingly liberal electorate that has long resided in New York City and its suburbs).
• Obama is a radical socialist.
• Obama has stopped fighting, or at last drastically scaled back on, the War on Terror/Radical Islam.

In each of these cases, the conservative media/activist leadership gives its members a handful of cherry-picked facts, without any of the contravening facts or all-important context to, as Jason put it so beautifully, “ensure that those kept in managed ignorance get just enough news, and never more than they need to remain exactly where they are.”

We do not trust sources of news and leaders to merely provide us with a handful of cherry-picked facts; we trust sources of news and leaders to provide us that information in a comprehensive fashion that accurately portrays those facts in their relevant context.  News sources and leaders abuse that trust and “manage ignorance” when they fail to do so, and particularly when they fail to do so in the context of advancing their narrative with their audience.

Out in real America, I strongly suspect that there’s a class of people that never got the whole story about Shirley Sherrod. They heard that she was a racist against white people and that she works for Obama. That’s all they know, and that’s all they will know. For them, that’s enough. The media has moved on, which plausibly it should, and anyway, there are only so many hours in the day.

Though the story’s long over — a whole three days ago — I think it might still be worth plumbing the depths of ignorance about current events and considering how that ignorance works politically. It’s just possible, for example, that energizing the ignorant in the Sherrod affair was altogether worth it. The collateral damage was overwhelmingly among people who weren’t in Andrew Breitbart’s corner anyway. On a cost-benefit analysis, the whole thing might even be counted a smashing success.

Similar examples abound. Ignorance has become a feature where it used to be a bug. Formerly it was the job of the media to correct ignorance, insofar as it was possible (and, truthfully, it wasn’t very possible). Now though it’s increasingly the job of the media to manage ignorance. To make a space for the ignorant, and to ensure that those kept in managed ignorance get just enough news, and never more than they need to remain exactly where they are.

We were probably due for some measure of managed ignorance, what with the already stupefying mix of rational ignorance, the cable news cycle, cognitive dissonance, and in-group loyalty that shapes public opinion today. But still, consider: We found WMD in Iraq. We only tortured really, really bad people, we did it only in non-fatal ways, and they provided us worthwhile information. Same-sex marriage is going to force churches to do things they don’t believe in. There will be death panels deciding your grandma’s fate. Climategate destroyed global warming science forever.

All are untrue, but there are those who believe every one of them, and these people’s opinions about where to go from here don’t count any less just because they’re based on untruth. Those who propagate such beliefs know them to be untrue, and they know it’s not worth the average person’s time, cognitive investment, and loss of group loyalty to discover otherwise.

Yes, these examples all show conservatives as the beneficiaries of managed ignorance. I’ve tried hard to resist the conclusion, but conservatives seem to bank on it a lot more than liberals. More than anything else, it’s this style of politics that turns me away from the Republicans. I’d pick “well-informed on basic facts but ideologically divergent” over “mis-informed on basic facts and ideologically divergent” every single time. Not that I’d enjoy the choice. But what other alternatives are there?

In my first post in this series, I claimed that Charles Hill, Yale’s “Diplomat in Residence,” had won “uncritical, almost fulsome praise.” You can strike the “almost.”  According to Edward Luttwak’s review, Hill’s book Grand Strategies is not just “a truly masterful synthesis” (truly masterful, mind you) but also “a kaleidoscopic masterpiece that illuminates all it surveys.”  Luttwak confesses to “exuberant enthusiasm generated by page after page of inspired writing.”  But can a book be both kaleidoscopic (creating an endless series of different patterns) and a synthesis (fitting disparate phenomena into a single pattern) at the same time? I suspect that Luttwak doesn’t understand the concept of “grand strategy” anymore than Hill does, which explains why he cannot even find consistent grounds for praise.

In any case, I still demur from the consensus.  In Chapter 3 of Hill’s appearance on Uncommon Knowledge, he unwittingly reveals the poverty of his concept of grand strategy.  Discussing the Peloponnesian War, Hill relates how Pericles advised the Athenians not to fight Spartan soldiers on land but to withdraw behind Athens’ walls.  An unforeseen event then undoes Pericles plan:

Hill: Then suddenly the plague strikes Athens. And that’s bad fortunate. Nobody foresaw it. What do you do about that? It’s not in your plan. How to deal with something that suddenly comes up that is just an absolute disaster. An oil spill. What do you do? Were you prepared? No. In fact, he told the Athenians to come into the city: The plague is worse because they’re all crammed together. And on down the line. It goes again and again with 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 – innumerable factors that the grand strategist has got to — you won’t know the answer, but you’ve got to at least have the sense that there’s something out there, there, there, there or behind you.

The plague in Athens is a quintessential example of the role of chance and contingency in history. A biological accident decimated the Athenians and thereby changed the course of history. Hill doesn’t see it, but the role of chance and probability undermines his whole concept of grand strategy.  In Chapter 1, we saw that Hill laments that students no longer learn “the sweep, the meaning, the narrative of history.”  But the plague in Athens shows that sweeping interpretations of history are invariably wrong. It is not just that they overplay some facts and overlook others, though that is certainly true. Rather, endemic to grand narratives is the “representativeness heuristic” — that is, if there is a large effect, then there must be a large cause.  Athens lost the Peloponnesian War: a big event which must have a big cause, right?  Wrong. The cause of Athens’ loss was a tiny virus.

Hill ignores the implications of the Athenian plague, namely, that grand narrative is specious.  No sooner is he finished with Ancient Greece in Chapter 3, but he is making sweeping claims about America in Chapter 4.

Robinson: [Discussing the Declaration of Independence] So it is no accident, it is no mere rhetorical flourish that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

Hill: Exactly. Exactly. And here is where America becomes universal. Because everybody in the world, no matter what ethnicity, or what color or what gender or what religion, they’ve all got souls. And America is for that universal purpose. It also means freedom. Because the soul is independent and has rights. And so America stands for that. It’s a very simple idea but it’s huge.

America, in other words, is the embodiment of a Big Idea, namely, human equality (an idea that Hill attributes to the School of Salamanca rather than, say, Locke).  Hill ignores everything else that makes America America, from the mores of the settlers who happened to come here to the vast quantities of land that made equality of condition possible.  Instead, Hill’s interpretation of America is quasi-metaphysical.  America, he says, is “for the universal purpose” of freedom.  Even in 1776, of course, freedom could be enjoyed in any number of countries. Nor has America ever offered the blessings of American freedom to everybody.  America, therefore, is not “universal.”  It is just one country among many.  What is Hill even talking about?

We find out later in the chapter:

Hill: You can see in one section [of Grand Strategies] after another that America is really distinctive. The debate that’s been going on: “Is America exceptional”? Certainly the faculties and the intellectuals say no it’s not, the president says no it’s not.

Robinson: Let me quote you.  President Obama speaking in France last year: “I believe in American exceptionalism. Just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” That’s the president of the United States.

Hill: Then he doesn’t understand America. And may be what John Bolton was driving at when he says “this is the first post-American president.”

But President Obama admitted that America is exceptional!  Evidently that’s not enough for Hill.  America, you see, has to be exceptionally exceptional: that is, American “exceptionalism” must consist in denying (contrary to, you know, actual fact) that other nations are “exceptional” too.  Anything else would be un-American!  All this jejune talk about “American exceptionalism” –whatever that means — simply amounts in the end to an ideological rationalization for American hegemony.  Put aside whether American hegemony is a good thing or not.  The mush-mindedness of all this – America stands for an Idea and is divinely appointed to spread this Idea to the remotest regions of the globe – is stupefying.  Yet this is what passes for intellectual discourse at Yale.

Just as a counterpoint to Hill, I can’t help but quote William Graham Sumner:

There is not a civilized nation which does not talk about its civilizing mission just as grandly as we do. . . .  Now each nation laughs at all the others when it observes these manifestations of national vanity. You may rely upon it that they are all ridiculous by virtue of these pretensions, including ourselves. The point is that each of them repudiates the standards of the others, and the outlying nations, which are to be civilized, hate all the standards of civilized men.

We assume that what we like and practice, and what we think better, must come as a welcome blessing to Spanish-Americans and Filipinos. This is grossly and obviously untrue. They hate our ways. They are hostile to our ideas. Our religion, language, institutions, and manners offend them. They like their own ways, and if we appear amongst them as rulers, there will be social discord in all the great departments of social interest. The most important thing which we shall inherit from the Spaniards will be the task of suppressing rebellions. If the United States takes out of the hands of Spain her mission, on the ground that Spain is not executing it well, and if this nation in its turn attempts to be school-mistress to others, it will shrivel up into the same vanity and self-conceit of which Spain now presents an example.

Sober, clear-headed, analytic: a refreshing contrast to Hill.  In chapter 5, Hill finally applies his concept of “grand strategy” to recent events:

Hill: [describing the Reagan foreign policy team] They saw things in the larger, in the entirety or close to it. They saw that – it used to be the case that when the alarm bell rang in the operating center of the state department it might be a coup d’etat in the Seychelles. So you might say “who cares about that?” But everything matters. They saw the connections. but at the end of the cold war it became partial, it became demarcated. [For Clinton and Bush 41 by contrast] You do things on one side of an issue. You don’t think of the whole thing because the tensions aren’t there. The feeling was not there that there’s a real danger out there that is of great magnitude.

Hmm, yes, the “feeling” of real danger was not there.  Maybe that’s because…. there was no danger! The Cold War had ended. In the Cold War, for geo-strategic and ideological reasons, every corner of the globe became just another theater of the Soviet-U.S. conflict. That’s why “everything mattered”: it wasn’t the superior wisdom of American statesmen then but the circumstances that they faced.  Hill seems to think it was a good thing that, until the end of the Cold War, every matter of policy had to be considered in light of some over-arching objective, never mind the costs to the U.S. or others.  To less fevered minds, however, the “demarcation” of issues after the Cold War was a blessing.

Hill:  Only in the last decade or seven or eight years have we begun or some of us have begun to sense the magnitude of that danger again. Because of the rise of Islamism. Because as in the Cold War, where communism.  Here we go back to Westphalia. Communism was opposed to every one of those procedural elements. The state had to be destroyed, smashed. International law was a tool of the bourgeois capitalist classes. Human rights was a farce. Against all of that, they would, the communist ideology, which was a religion in effect, was “We will destabilize the international system, we’ll overthrow it, and we’ll replace it.” That’s the same agenda that Islamists have. So in some sense the 1990s were a lost decade where we didn’t understand problems. Today I think people do understand it, but not Washington.

So communism and Islamism share ideological similarities.  Never mind that the Soviets had the world’s largest land army and intercontinental missiles aimed at major American cities, while Islamists are poor, ignorant, persecuted, few, and don’t even control a single state.  To view Islamism as a threat comparable to communism is absurd.  Evidently, Hill’s favorite maxims – “take everything into account” and “be one upon whom nothing is lost” – are not to be taken literally.  On the contrary, for Hill, the statesman should ignore any relevant facts that get in the way of constructing a specious ideological narrative.

Listening to Hill, one is reminded that a little learning a dangerous thing.  Hill takes a fairly conventional neoconservative ideology and adorns it with a few pleasing references to Thucydides and Montaigne.  Do not be fooled.  This is not knowledge but sciolism.  (Indeed, Hill admits his hostility to actual knowledge.)  As guides to international affairs, his teachings are worse than useless.

Not being a hipster, I don’t always get around to reading every issue of Vice in a timely manner. Or wait — do hipsters read anything in a timely manner? It’s only ever “before you read it” or “once it’s retro.” Which this month’s issue isn’t gonna be, in either case.

Anyway, there’s this:

My aim was to create garments that the majority of the US citizenry would find offensive and, more specifically, submit designs so despicable that most custom-tee printers would refuse to print them. Still, my ultimate goal was to find a willing printer and get the shirts made no matter what. Mark Twain, perhaps the quintessential American author, once wrote: “Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.” Each entrepreneur who refused my business would define yet another instance of American indecency and chip away at the bedrock of liberty as we know it.

I began by setting some guidelines: The topics of racism, sexism, and politics were deemed too easy for this exercise, primarily because online retailers already provide a bountiful selection of knee-jerk schlock marketed to college students and bigots. I also afforded myself the luxury of ratcheting up the viciousness of the shirt designs if the printer proved too eager to accept the initial unseemly idea.

I am happy to report that the First Amendment prevailed and every one of my ideas—even when pushed past the limits of my own morals and common sense—was eventually affixed to a t-shirt for around $20 a pop (except for one pricy exception). Sure, it took enduring a little verbal abuse and a bit of shopping around, but I believe our forefathers would be proud that even today the combined forces of capitalism and free speech triumph over America’s prudish moral quibbles.

Which is misconceived on so many levels. Even aside from the overwriting, which I kind of take for granted at Vice. (Citizenry? Define yet another instance?)

It doesn’t prove much about the First Amendment that you can get a t-shirt printed, even an offensive one. It wouldn’t prove much if you couldn’t get a t-shirt printed. The First Amendment doesn’t provide a right to commercial service or message placement. It doesn’t provide a right to offend, or a right not to be offended, or an obligation for anyone to squash their own feelings of offense. Not on their own property, anyway.

This being Vice, the shirt ideas are pretty damn offensive (and one or two are kind of funny, once you get the joke). The most offensive thing to me, however, is that some business owners seem to believe that the First Amendment directs them to print things even when they don’t want to. The author certainly does:

I explained that the t-shirt I wanted to print had the potential to get a person killed, or at the very least severely maimed, if it was worn while walking around the sordid streets of NYC. She replied, “We’ll print anything. We don’t care.”

…I sent it off and waited for an infuriated phone call. Twenty minutes passed and my phone rang. It was another employee (or perhaps the owner?) of the print shop, this time a male. He told me he did not appreciate my sense of humor. I insisted that it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be funny and questioned his appreciation of the Constitution of the United States of America. In a fit of rage he stuttered before spitting out “You motherfucker!” and hanging up the phone.

At least he didn’t print the shirt. Good for him.

Testing a post from a friend’s iPhone. No way to make it a minipost though.

So I had planned a running critique of Charles Hill’s appearance on Peter Robinson’s webTV program, Uncommon Knowledge.  Alas, I got through just one chapter before getting rudely sidetracked by the need to make a living.  So, this response to Chapter 2 comes a little late; we’ll have to see about the others.

As I observed in my first post, the more Hill explains his concept of “grand strategy,” the more dubious it sounds.  In Chapter 2, it gets only more so:

Robinson: You present [your book] Grand Strategies as an act of restoration. This book is an effort to reestablish an understanding and appreciation of the international system by first — if I’m reading it correctly — reestablishing a way of thought, almost a mode of consciousness.  

Grand strategy as a “mode of consciousness” – sounds trippy!  It is ironic that Hill attacks the 1960s, for it seems that grand strategy has a lot in common with hippie culture.  (Hill, incidentally, is a baby boomer.)  Both hippie culture and grand strategy denigrate technical knowledge or knowledge that can be written down.  Both favor instead “modes of consciousness” that supposedly produce an alternative sort of enlightenment.  I might further add that both hippies and grand strategists gravitate to charismatic gurus.  You need a mentor teach you the Tao of correct thought.

Robinson: [Quoting Hill's book] “Statecraft cannot be practiced in the absence of literary insight.”  How come? 

It is not surprising that Hill compares grand strategy to literary criticism.  The literary critic typically has extreme confidence in his opinions, despite the lack of any obvious grounds for preferring one set of opinions over another.  Is Satan the true hero of Paradise Lost?  Does Jane Austen embrace or reject the mores of the society she depicts?  In answering these imponderables, you don’t see critics weighing the evidence, acknowledging weaknesses or qualifying their judgments.  Each critic sallies forth, boldly proclaiming his reading correct, notwithstanding the many equally satisfying alternatives.  Both “grand strategy” and ”literary insight” are products more of hubris than knowledge.

Hill: This also goes to the question of education because literature has been sidelined, again, I believe in large part because of the changes, the many cultural revolutions of the 1960s that began to say “You want to have a literature curriculum that represents the ethnicity of the author not the value of the work.” So the so-called canon was ripped up.

Robinson:  All those Dead White Males.

Hill:  All those Dead White Males.

Ok, stop right there. I believe in the Western canon as much as the next man, but the idea that the canon has been “ripped up” is simply false.  If you want to study, say, Spinoza, you have ample chances to do so at a place like Yale, often under the tutelage of the best scholars in the world.  Nor have students been brainwashed into thinking that they should avoid all those evil Dead White Males.  On the contrary, many desperately want to learn what The Rape of the Lock was about or what cogito ergo sum means.  It’s true that many students also graduate utterly ignorant of these things. The does not mean that an education in “the best of what has been thought and said by man” is somehow unavailable.

Hill: Literature is essential to the idea of statecraft and grand strategy because literature is pre-disciplinary.  If you look at the Iliad, the Odyssey, you can tell that in there is philosophy, and history and politics, and social science even, and military history.  It’s taking place before those different parts of the intellect were portioned out and little fences put around them.  So you say “Well I don’t do that because I’m a political scientist. I’m not an historian.”

Again Hill again dismisses technical knowledge in favor or some more elusive form of enlightenment.  “Grand strategy,” you see, is “pre-disciplinary,” meaning, that it does not respect artificial intellectual boundaries.  As a disciple of New Age religion might say, grand strategy ”holistic.”  But specialization is a sign not of intellectual decline but advance.  A discipline does not even become a discipline until after some theoretical breakthrough.  Without Mendel, there would be no genetics; without Chomsky, no linguistics; without Planck, no quantum physics.  A “predisciplinary” mindset is one in which none of these discoveries is conceivable in the first place. Hill yearns to return us to our intellectual infancy.

Robinson: Alright, Charlie, I’m not going to give you a chance to prove the relevance of literature.  Aeschylus. Oresteia.  5th century BC. You claim in Grand Strategy that this is “The central character in the transition from the primieval cycle of revenge to a civil society based on judicial order.”  Talk to me about that.

Hill: That’s something you can see not only in Aeschylus and Oresteia — though that’s the first case, brilliantly put forward in a trilogy which we have — but it’s still something going on today.  Societies do this in different points.  It is in American folklore, the Hatfields and the McCoys. It is — do you have a society where revenge is the way you maintain order?  Somebody in your family wrongs somebody in my family, I’m going to get you back because I’m going to have somebody in my family wrong somebody in your family, and back and forth.  In the Oresteia, this is cascading down generation to generation. And that’s the way that that society ran itself. The blood feud was the way you kept order and in some rough sense justice. 

Now this is just bizarre. Given a chance to prove the relevance of literature to statecraft, Hill cites a text – Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy — to illustrate a anthropological claim – that primitive societies are marked by blood-feuds – that the text in question has nothing to do with. The Oresteia are indeed about vendettas – but the vendette are within a single family, namely, the House of Atreus. A blood feud, by contrast, is a vendetta between families.  If anything, the the extreme intra-family hostilities in the Oresteia undermine the clan loyalties that make blood feuds possible.  Contrary to Hill, the Oresteia is not inconsistent with tribalism. 

Hill:  In the Oresteia, that crosses over into a civil society when suddenly the parties involved say, we gotta stop this. And Athena, a literary character, and she begins to run a process that enables the parties to say “we will let a system of justice arise that will satisfy us in a way that revenge blood feud used to do, but in a way that’s much more orderly. It will not force us to retaliate and take revenge.  The larger society will have laws and justice will be applied in that way.

So Athena bestows the blessings of rational justice.  Isn’t Athena, um, like, a goddess?  That the gods end the cycle of revenge in Oresteia doesn’t seem to trouble Hill, but it should.  For, if it takes divine intervention to create civil society, then we should not presume that we know how to do it ourselves.  The Greeks had a religious ideology to undergird their concept of the polis and their superior, more civilized methods of justice.  Without something similar, tribal societies should be left alone.

 Yet Hill draws the opposite lesson:

Robinson: So there’s this struggle between civil society — the legitimate law enforcement — and the old clan system of honor and family is still going on. Here’s how write about it in  Grand Strategies, “Eons long struggle between the clans and the civil society of statehood is still alive in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle east.”  Is President Obama aware of that?

Hill: No I don’t think that he is.  I think that it’s not understood by Washington, and it’s not just this administration but the one before — that we are here dealing with a very large system that has been built over centuries. 

Just for the record, you obviously can’t glean patterns of clan loyalties in the Middle East from reading Aeschylus.  The relevance of Aeschylus to Middle East policy is obscure to say the least.

Why are we there? And here’s a grand strategic point to it. These are all connected.  What you do in Afghanistan and what you in Iraq is connected to each other.  I think General Petraeus . . . fully understands this but I think that Washington does not, because you here them saying “well we have to get out of this area and focus on this one. We wrap it up over here and move from A to B. With no sense of the reality, which is that every part will reverberate, will have something to do with the other parts.

Ok, so the entire Middle East is beset by tribalism, which prevents the emergence of a modern, rational state, or Gesellschaft, if you will.  But then Hill draws a “grand-strategic” point that is utterly nonsensical.  If the Middle East is not capable of modernity – or, at least, as we learn from Aeschylus, it would take a miracle to teach it to them — then the correct policy is to leave them alone.  Hill, by contrast, complains that we are not nation-building in as many areas in the Middle East as possible.  It is unclear how the tribalism of the Middle East means that nation-building must be done on some vast semi-continental scale.  Does Hill think that the only thing preventing the Afghans from creating a modern state is that they are waiting for the Iraqis to go first?  I don’t see where he could get that in Aeschylus, or anywhere else.

[Note: This post discusses the second chapter of the book Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges, which some of us are reading. It mainly discusses pornography in general, so I'd like to invite those who aren't reading the book to feel free to chime in.]

When pornographer “Max Hardcore” was sentenced to jail time for mailing obscenity in 2008, Glenn Greenwald wrote a characteristically outraged defense of his free speech rights for Salon. Journalist Susannah Breslin, who has long covered the porn industry, and how the Internet is deindustrializing it, wrote to Greenwald, suggesting he watch the films, which he hadn’t. Greenwald responded to her:

“I really don’t care what consenting adults do with one another in order to entertain themselves or please themselves sexually–I’m not a busy body trying to sit in judgment of what other adults choose to do with themselves, especially in their sex lives… it’s nobody’s business what they do, and whatever they do isn’t going to change my mind in the slightest.”

I sympathize with Greenwald; but his response illustrates a dilemma I’ve seen liberals, and libertarians face quite often: is it possible to register revulsion at revolting art without being taken as endorsing censorship? I’ve heard many liberals, quite a few of them feminists, say, “Porn isn’t my thing, but I think people should be free to make it and watch it.” And I’m a bit of a free speech extremist anyway, so I agree. But does that mean you have no opinion on the content? Or no personal standards? Can’t we both defend free speech and recognize that quite a lot of art is garbage, or even wonder aloud why people make or consume it? Hey, I think people should be perfectly free to make and watch a movie like Top Gun, but I sure can’t relate to them. [Read more →]

As someone who’s won the citizenship lottery (read: American born), I’m very reluctant to comment on immigration. But I do believe in certain mild restrictions on the influx of new arrivals, so here’s my dilemma in a nutshell.

I basically agree with Gregory Clark’s thesis in A Farewell to Alms, ably summarized here by my distinguished co-blogger. My question for Clark (and others) is simple: If our national success is the product of centuries of social, political, and economic development, how long will it take for poorer countries to emulate our model? I find this question particularly vexing because even the West isn’t quite sure what works and what doesn’t. We know that capitalism, a dollop of social welfare spending, and representative democracy function pretty well (compared to the alternatives, at least), but nobody is quite sure how we got here (High levels of social trust, you say? Economic dynamism? Well, where do those characteristics come from?). We’re not completely clueless, but historians have been debating what makes societies tick since Gibbon blamed Christianity for the Fall of Rome, and we’ve yet to distill this process into an exact science

So the West is both successful and difficult to emulate (I suspect this would be true even if we could identify the exact precursors to liberal democratic capitalism). This suggests that the best poverty alleviation program is to let as many people across the border as possible to share the fruits of our historical good fortune. On the other hand, the frailty and complexity of the Western model suggests that a massive influx of foreigners could place an unbearable strain on the social, cultural, and political norms that allow the United States to function. In short, the very complexity that makes us so difficult to emulate also makes it difficult to absorb wave after wave of new arrivals.

I know my thoughts on this subject have very little to do with the political debate over immigration . But I think it help explains why I sympathize with some of the more mild advocates of restrictionism, who don’t scapegoat Mexican immigrants for imaginary crime sprees but are concerned with preserving the United States’ political, social, and economic culture. Bryan Caplan has this about right:

A few liberals – and many libertarians – literally advocate open borders.  I recognize that immigration is the greatest foreign aid program in human history, and I sympathize with the plight of would-be immigrants in the Third World.  Most immigrants – legal or not – are nice people.  But open borders is crazy.   It seriously risks killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell

And the profit and loss.

                          A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

                          Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

~ T.S. Elliot, from The Waste Land

I have not finished Iain M. Banks’s first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, yet. But I wanted to comment on it nonetheless.

It’s quite excellent both in terms of good, imaginative science fiction and just in pure literary terms. Banks is quite the writer. Vivid language is coupled with a fast paced inter-galactic romp all against the backdrop of a vast star-system-spanning clash of civilizations. Like any good novel, the events only get worse and worse before they – presumably – get better.

There was, however, one scene in this book which had me feeling quite literally physically ill. I won’t go into detail – no spoilers here – but this particular scene had to be about the most graphic, terrifying thing I’ve read in about as long as I can remember. Those of you who’ve read the book probably know what I’m referring to, but in case you’ve forgotten it has to do with a particular religious cult on an island on the Vavatch Orbital. For those of you who have not read the book, let me just say it is not for the feint of heart or the weak-stomached.

That aside, the book is so far quite splendid. I’ll report back when I’ve finished the whole thing.

Rod Dreher, writing at his new digs at Big Questions Online, has this to say about parenting and happiness:

“The loss of parental freedom is severe, and if young marrieds had any idea how difficult raising children can be, they might never conceive. Today, my wife and I are smack in the middle of raising three small children, each of whom presents a particular challenge. So many nights we are just flat-out exhausted. We have little time for ourselves anymore, and don’t have the money or liberty to do the fun things we once did. By conventional standards of measuring happiness, we ought not be happy.

And, I would say, we aren’t exactly happy. Rather, we’re joyful. I don’t for a minute regret having chosen parenthood, despite all the pain, frustration and heartbreak. I think there’s a difference between happiness and joy. Happiness is a superficial and fragile thing; joy is happiness that has been deepened and refined by tragedy. Joy is happiness with dimension. Joy is what you have that tells you that the burden is light, the yoke is freedom. It looks like a lie, maybe, from the outside, which is why, I think, my sister told me that we weren’t going to be able to understand what we will have lost and what we will have gained from parenthood until we’ve lived it.”

I’ve always considered the loss-of-happiness arguments against parenting to be fairly weak. Happiness is hard to define. I’m happy when I eat a piece of chocolate cake. I’m happy when I eat two pieces of chocolate cake. But if I keep eating pieces of chocolate cake I’ll be unhealthy and get really fat and pretty soon I won’t be so happy, even when I’m eating pieces of chocolate cake. I’m happy just sitting around in the evening on the couch – perfectly happy to not go on a run.

But I’m more happy after I go on the run, even though it took time and work and even though it hurts more than sitting on the couch does. Similarly, many of us would be enormously happy to never have to go to work or earn our living, but many of us also realize that after a few weeks sitting around the house doing nothing, we’re unlikely to feel terribly good.
Work gives us purpose and occupies our time, which makes the time spent not working all that much more meaningful.

Children are like that in a way, but they’re also more than that. Having children gives us an extended purpose. Yes, they’re tons of work, but when all is said and done at the end of the day and they’re asleep peacefully and it’s just the two of you sitting there exhausted on the couch with toys and clothes strewn everywhere and dishes piled up and the pillow beckoning – well there’s a peacefulness to that. And when you come home from work and your daughter’s eyes light up and a smile leaps to her face and she commences in telling you excitedly all the huge and wonderful things she’s done today – well nothing quite compares. I don’t miss my days of childless freedom. When our daughter spends the night with her grandparents, the house feels quiet and empty, like a huge piece of what makes us whole is suddenly absent.

Kids are lots of work, but the work is part of what makes the joy real.

Without endorsing or disputing it (for personal reasons, there are important elements of Webb’s piece that I am not comfortable commenting upon) , I just want to say that this piece by Jim Webb in today’s Wall Street Journal is compelling and thought-provoking, although I agree with James Joyner that I’m not entirely sure what policy conclusions Webb expects us to reach.  At a minimum, though, Webb’s piece is an actual attempt at real dialogue about racial politics rather than the typical bomb-throwing that usually passes for debate.  Whatever you may think of his positions, Webb is one of the few truly independent-thinking (as opposed to merely centrist) politicians around.

If you have seen I am Love, you should go read Matthew Milliner’s review, which explains what most of the critics who reviewed the film seemed to miss. Spoilers below.

[Read more →]

I’d like to fully endorse this post from Noah Millman. I was talking to my wife about the Shirley Sherrod affair and she basically said, who cares if a blog posted the video? Most of the stuff you read on blogs is total bullshit anyways. The real scandal is that Sherrod was fired because of what a blog posted.

Here’s Noah:

Think about it. If Sherrod had been kept on, been interviewed, explained the situation to her supervisor, and that information made its way up the chain of command until Obama’s press secretary told everybody that her remarks were “taken out of context” – well, what do you think the trajectory of this news story would have been?

At best, the world would have just moved on – and the “Obama is a racist” meme would have gotten an additional push. Most likely the story would shift seamlessly to how Obama would have fired a white person accused of racism on the spot, so even though Sherrod was not guilty of the charges the Administration’s reaction would prove it was racist. It’s even possible that we’d be talking about two “versions” or “interpretations” of the event, and people would feel totally free to continue to believe that Breitbart’s original take on Sherrod was the correct “interpretation” of her speech. And she’d never be fully cleared of the taint of racism.

But because Vilsack fired her for no good reason, she’s an innocent victim, and the story is about Breitbart. Sherrod gets her job back and nobody thinks ill of her, and the Administration winds up being criticized from the center for not standing up to the right. Which, I suspect, is just where Obama would like to be.

Interesting incentive structure, that.

Interesting, indeed.

Quite frankly, I could care less what Andrew Breitbart posts. Dealing with Breitbart, I say caveat emptor! That the Obama administration, or Vilsack acting on his own, would actually force the resignation of one of its employees over something posted at Big Government is beyond the pale. That Breitbart posted it is, well, nothing new. Certainly nothing newsworthy. So why is Breitbart in the crosshairs? The Obama administration is the employer who fired an employee without cause.

Everyone is talking about racism in regards to this story. What I want to know is whatever happened to loyalty? Say what you will about the Bush administration, but at least the former president understood the meaning of that word if not the pronunciation of many others.

P.S.

I think it would be very classy of Breitbart to apologize. Lord knows, I would if I were in his shoes (though I would not have published the video if I were in his shoes either!).  He could even use it to his advantage. He could say: “I’m deeply sorry that the video we posted of Shirley Sherrod’s speech caused her employer, the Obama Administration, to force her resignation. That was certainly not our intention. We regret that posting the video had this effect and if we had to do it over, we would not have posted it.”

Tim Lee’s post on the decline of St. Louis is fascinating and heart-breaking all at once. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a visceral dislike of city freeways. This is partly because I’ve lived in cities that avoided this catastrophe and in cities that, sadly, did not. A city like Phoenix which is essentially built for freeways will never be a great city; a city such as St. Louis which was once a far more vibrant metropolis, has had its vitality strangled out of it by the network of freeways cutting one neighborhood off from the other.

If you’re not convinced, just imagine if the anti-freeway camp had lost the fight to keep a freeway out of downtown Manhattan.

Tim describes the destruction of a downtown neighborhood in St. Louis to create a park and to revitalize downtown by constructing the Gateway Arch.

St. Louis, where I lived between 2005 and 2008, is a textbook example. Consider the St. Louis Arch, which began as a Depression-era project to “revitalize” downtown St. Louis by leveling about 20 blocks of prime riverfront real estate to make room for a park. Not surprisingly, this plan drew fierce opposition from the people who were living and working in those 20 blocks. But the government used its power of eminent domain to take the properties over their objections. (As an aside: the Arch is formally the centerpiece of theJefferson National Expansion Memorial. There’s something perversely fitting about the fact that thousands of people were forcibly evicted from their land to make room for a monument to commemorate the forcible eviction of Native Americans from their land.)

Anyway, after a few years of litigation, demolitions began in 1940. Then the project got bogged down in budget problems and more litigation, and so the area was used as a gigantic parking lot for two decades, before work on the arch finally began in 1963.

Meanwhile, work began on the urban portion of the Interstate Highway System. Planners in St. Louis, as in most American cities, decided that the new expressways would run directly through the cities’ downtowns. One of them (I-44/I-70) now runs North to South between the park and downtown. Not surprisingly, if you visit the park today you’ll find a light sprinkling of tourists, but nothing like the throngs of locals you’ll find in successful urban parks like New York’s Union Square, Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, or DC’s Dupont Circle. Whatever “revitalizing” effects the park might have had on the rest of the city were undermined by the fact that the park isn’t really accessible to pedestrians in the rest of the city.

Unsurprisingly, the careful planning and exorbitant spending required to ‘revitalize’ downtown areas by bulldozing buildings and erecting inaccessible parks, and the ‘convenience’ afforded residents of a city by paving huge freeways through their most interesting urban areas, all fall short of the economic boons that dense, walkable areas provide:

Cities generate wealth by bringing large numbers of people into proximity with one another. Two adjacent high-density neighborhoods will be richer than either could be alone because businesses at the edge of each neighborhood will be enriched by pedestrian traffic from the other. Driving a freeway through the middle of a healthy urban neighborhood not only destroys thousands of homes, it rips apart tightly integrated neighborhoods. Pedestrians rarely walk across freeways, so businesses near a new freeway are immediately deprived of half their customers. Similarly, residents near a new freeway lose access to half the businesses near them. The area along the freeway becomes what Jacobs calls a “border vaccuum” and goes into a kind of death spiral: because it contains little pedestrian traffic, businesses there don’t succeed. And because there are no interesting businesses there, even fewer people go there, which hurts the sales of businesses further from the freeway. The harms from such a freeway extends for blocks on either side.

All of which pushes urbanites out of the city and into the suburbs. As Tim notes, this exodus is hardly chosen.