As much as I enjoy observing, analyzing, and commenting on American politics and cultural issues, there invariably comes that point where my having not lived in the country of my attention results in perceptive opaqueness. At times, the foreign elements of my unfamiliarity can seem helpful in shining a light into corners where other would customarily fail to do so. Other times, it seems as though I am ever trying to build a puzzle with missing pieces.

As my attention has refocused towards a balancing on the politics of what is arguably the most powerful nation on the planet — the proverbial “900 pound gorilla” of a nieghbour with whom I’ve lived my entire life — and the machinations of my own home country, the dynamics of this careful ballet become increasingly pronounced and of interest to me. I thought it might be useful to speak with another blogger who straddles worlds in a similar and far more successful manner.

Alex Massie, former authour of The Debatable Land, Washington Correspondent for The Scotsman, and current blogger for the Spectator was kind enough to take the time to trade some emails with me about his experience writing about US politics and culture as an “outsider”.

Check out the interview below the fold. [Read more →]

Via Br. Dave, probably the best, simplest explanation of the credit crisis I’ve seen thus far. It doesn’t go terribly deep, and leaves out a lot, but it gives a great visual summary of how the hell we ended up here. How the hell we get out of here is another question altogether.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Elsewhere, Jack Gillis helps shed some light on the current proposed loosening of the mark-to-market rules:

The hearing ended with Kanjorski threatening to pass legislation to force Herz to loosen standards. In fact, the pressure was so intense that the FASB. The pressure was so intense that the FASB announced the new rule after only a week. The Chairman of the full committee, Barney Frank, seems to have accepted it as a foregone conclusion. This is absolutely unacceptable. Democrats pressing for this, like Paul Kanjorski and Gary Ackerman, need to stop. Go-along Democrats like Senator Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank need to stop going along. As a Democrat myself, I can complain about the Republicans all I want but the fact remains, the Democrats hold power and it is only because of pressure from Democrats that this loosening is being rushed to implementation. At the end of the day, loosening mark-to-market will only allow the fraud that is the current financial system to be perpetrated, er, I mean, perpetuated.

[Read more →]

Kyle’s post yesterday the other day about the need for the GOP to stop focusing on “how” it was going to come back from the wilderness if it ever wants to get back to relevance made a lot of sense to me.  The political reality is that the GOP, despite its recent defeats, continues to consist of tens of millions of faithful voters, including moderates, party fundamentalists, social conservatives, libertarians, etc.  And exactly none of those voters are going to change their worldview overnight just because some pundit says that it would be more electorally sound if they did so.  So whatever direction one thinks the GOP should go as a matter of policy, the political reality is that it is incapable of consciously choosing any new direction. 

Does this mean that the party is permanently doomed?  No – we live in a two-party federalist system, and that’s not about to change soon. 

Today, I think I finally have a picture of exactly how that road back to relevance is going to look (which is different from the normative picture of how I think it should look), thanks in part to this Politico interview with Gov. Huntsman of Utah.  In the interview, Huntsman spells out a worldview that some would call “moderate,” but is instead quite along the lines of the various reformist conservatives – it’s a distincly different type of worldview from that of Arlen Specter & Co. 

Matt Yglesias thinks the growth of reformism amongst elected officials like Huntsman and Gov. Crist of Florida means a coming civil war for the GOP.  But he argues that these voices seem confined to the state level, and that the GOP won’t actually start to reform on a national level until similar voices start getting elected to Congress. 

I disagree.  The reality is that change in political party policy doesn’t happen overnight; instead, it happens subtly and gradually over the course of years.  What we see in the reformist governors is the beginning of that change – it’s just not a change that is being consciously directed. 

Patrick Ruffini’s much-ballyhooed and criticized post on de-Plumberizing the Right gives a pretty good idea of where the Right is likely to go over the next few years on the federal level.  Specifically, Ruffini argues that what is need is not a change in policy, but a change in focus onto issues where 80% of Americans agree with Republicans, per Newt Gingrich’s strategy.  This actually makes quite a bit of sense as political strategy because it doesn’t involve alienating any of the base, which a political party cannot do without putting itself in an even worse position in the short-run.  Meanwhile, Robert Stacy McCain is probably right that it is politically more sound for Republicans to simply oppose anything the Dems try to do, and make them own it if (and some would say when) the Dem policies fail.  Besides, there’s rarely an electoral penalty for opposing something that succeeds; there’s frequently an electoral reward for opposing something that fails.  And this, of course, is precisely what Congressional Republicans seem to be doing.

The trouble with this approach, while it probably will work in the short-term, is that it is superficial, and only gets part of the GOP’s problems right, as Ross Douthat and Daniel Larison argue.  It allows Republicans to stop the bleeding, but those 80% issues aren’t going to be big picture enough to make the GOP relevant again in the minds of a lot of those who have abandoned it (“Drill, Baby, Drill” may be popular with a lot of people, but it’s not something that’s going to suddenly make many people Republicans). 

But GOP governors have the burden of actually governing rather than just criticizing, which is part of why several of them are solidly in the reformist camp.  They have no choice but to depart from dogma on core issues, which is precisely what Huntsman and Crist are doing.  Eventually, though, the national GOP’s change in focus will loosen the dogma on issues where the national GOP is no longer proposing serious policy alternatives.  At that point, you will see reformist thought actually start to infect Republicans in Congress and maybe even Presidential primary candidates because it will no longer require annoying part of the base. 

To sum up: continued populism on the national level, but with a focus on pushing different issues while reflexively opposing Obama on just about everything; renewed reformism on the state level that ultimately winds up providing an example for a new affirmative agenda on the national level.  And no one will have planned it this way, since really it’s not what anyone wants right now – the change is too slow from the perspective of the reformists, and too much from the perspective of the base.  But happen, I think it will.  I just don’t know what reforms will wind up carrying the day, nor whether I personally will find those reforms palatable in a way that brings me back to the GOP fold (no matter what happens, I’m pretty happy staying an independent).

Cross-posted.

Robert Stacy McCain has a scathing post that seeks to permanently douse the concept of a left-libertarian coalition ever being a real possibility, which includes this little bit:

As a political impulse, the sort of libertarianism that scoffs at creationism and traditional marriage wields limited influence, because it appeals chiefly to a dissenting sect of the intelligentsia. It’s a sort of free-market heresy of progressivism, with no significant popular following nor any real prospect of gaining one, because most Ordinary Americans who strongly believe in economic freedom are deeply traditionalist. And most anti-traditionalists — the feminists, the gay militants, the “world peace” utopians — are deeply committed to the statist economic vision of the Democratic Party.

Yikes.  Now, of course, McCain is being somewhat hyperbolic in his characterization of the coalition of the political Left.  But in many ways there is a fair amount of truth to McCain’s fundamental point, which is that the response of the political Left to the economic crisis has dramatically undermined the basis for any theoretical coalition of “liberaltarians.”  To be sure, McCain thinks that the entire concept of such an alliance is a “luxury” that never had any chance at success, but the more pertinent issue is the role of the economic crisis in exploiting the divide between liberalism and libertarianism/classical liberalism.  This is a particularly difficult truth for me, as I have repeatedly gone on record predicting that “libertarians,” broadly defined, are likely to continue their recent trend towards the Democratic Party in terms of their voting habits.  Heck, I even put my money (and daughter’s toys) on the line by making a bet to this effect with John Schwenkler.

One of the things that has happened in the early days of the Obama Administration has been some fairly good (but by no means great) steps in the direction of restoring civil liberties and reigning in executive power.   While this is something libertarians such as me have absolutely cheered, the reality is that these issues were a major part of what was pushing libertarianism to the left in recent years.  As victories have been earned on those fronts, the entire basis for that move leftward is getting removed (although history tells us that we’re not about to see a complete restoration of civil liberties and balance of power anytime soon, either). 

To be sure, really good bases remain for a left-libertarian coalition on certain specific issues, especially the War on Drugs.  And I still fully agree with the great FA Hayek, whose opus Road to Serfdom describes many of those we now call liberals as essentially misled classical liberals (that we now call libertarians).  And that says nothing of his essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” – still relevant nearly half a century later.

So I still think that, at some point in time, progressives and libertarians will be reunited within a political coalition separate and distinct from conservatives.  But at a minimum the progressive response to the financial crisis, with its finger-pointing for the crisis almost solely at deregulation and its use of the stimulus bill as a means for implementing all sorts of pet projects that have little to do with stimulus even under a Keynesian analysis, has brought the economic divide between liberals and libertarians to the forefront in a way unseen for decades.

To be sure, I think conservatives - especially conservative politicians – have played a role in the whole situation, both by saddling us with massive debt in the name of the War on Terror and by repeatedly (and falsely) campaigning on the idea of Obama as a socialist (and thereby turning an unwinnable election into a de facto referendum on socialism).   But the fact is that the political Left, led by Congress, is now using this opportunity to implement wide-reaching policies that are anathema to libertarianism. 

Simply put, it appears that liberals and Progressives, at least the influential ones, have once again taken up the mantle that regulation is always (or almost always) good, and so is just about any form of non-military government spending.   As Virginia Postrel notes discussing the refusal of influential progressives to concern themselves with the effects of the abysmal, horrible, no good Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act:

Unfortunately, once you are ideologically committed to the idea of regulation, you can’t say that a given regulation is bad–or, worse, that maybe doing nothing new would have been the best course.

And this is the problem the rebirth of dogmatic support for regulation has created for any liberaltarian coalition.  Rather than consider ways of achieving liberal ends (which are usually shared by liberals and libertarians alike) that may have incorporated libertarian thinking or were at the very least highly targeted, progressive politicians have been choosing extraordinarily broad and intrusive means of achieving those ends.  This is not to say that those politicians ever really cared what libertarians thought; only that this route of action has undermined any possibility of a significant percentage of libertarians (again broadly defined as fiscally conservative and socially liberal) becoming intermediate-to-long-term members of the Dem coaltion.  [Read more →]

There is something remarkable and frightening about the fact that Avigdor Lieberman’s Party, Yisrael Beiteinu, came in third in Israel’s recent parliamentary elections, gaining 15 seats in the Knesset, only 13 fewer than Tipi Livni’s moderate Kadima Party and only 12 fewer than the Conservative Likud Party.  Yisrael Beiteinu, which translates to Israel is Our Home, campaigned on an anti-Arab ticket–denouncing Israeli Arabs as unpatriotic, and calling for their expulsion.  The Party could very well decide whether Likud or Kadima is the head of the next government, unless the two should choose to form a unity Government.

Now, every Democratic nation should be able to choose who they please to run their Government, even racially driven, extremist Parties like Yisrael Beiteinu, but the fact of that Party’s success does call to question how long Israel’s current course will be sustainable.  I am a great admirer of Israel, which I view as a a nation at odds with itself, a land of hope and tragedy, a strange mixture of redemption and defeat, startling oppression and the promise of freedom.

The birth of the State of Israel signaled the last chapter in the long Diaspora, but has led to sixty years of Palestinian existence as a homeless population–a sort of new Diaspora spread out across refugee camps, occupied territories, and Arab cities across the region; lead by terrorists, nationalists, and religious leaders; second class citizens in whatever place they have the bad luck of ending up in.  Israel, once lively with the dream of the original idealistis who founded it, has over the years become increasingly militarized, entrenched, and anti-Democratic.

I do sympathize with the plight of Israel.  It took a number of wars to drive them to this place.  Those misguided socialists whose ideas founded the Zionist movement have all been replaced by more realistic leaders.  Unfortunately, the reality that many of these new visionaries live by – be they Avigdor Lieberman or Tipi Livni -  is one of stubborn refusal to make the hard choices necessary to bring about a lasting peace, and in some cases a stubborn resolve to see these compromises aborted.

Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, ostensibly a move toward peace with the Palestinians, was coupled with increased settlement of the West Bank, a region fast becoming a mini-apartheid state with an state; a three-year blockade that has severely damaged the living conditions of Gazans (who had already become a captive market for Israeli exports, and have now been made dramatically more dependent on Israeli mercy and goods through the blockade and recent war); and despite all of this, continued rocket fire out of Gaza, continued violence between IDF forces and Palestinians, assassinations, arrests, and kidnappings–essentially, for all the increased militarism on Israel’s part, it has been met only with violent reprisal and the collective suffering of Israelis and Palestinians.

And now, Israelis have voted into the Knesset fifteen seats for a Party dedicated to the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, and the continued expansion of Israeli settlers into the West Bank–a policy whose logical outcome is the total expulsion of Palestinians and Arabs from Israel altogether, or into smaller Gaza-like enclaves within the West Bank, surrounded by Israeli security forces, and utterly dependent on Israel for their continued survival. [Read more →]

Professor Joseph Wagner of Colgate University, one of the three professors who most influenced the development of my early political thought, was fond of saying that the venom associated with certain issues was because the opposing parties “are not talking about the same thing.” For example, opponents of Roe v. Wade couch their arguments in terms of defending life, while proponents of Roe v. Wade couch their arguments in terms of defending choice – both important values that almost all of us hold dear.

In so doing, the two sides refuse to address the other side’s arguments. This refusal simultaneously allows the side making the argument to more or less credibly  cast the opposition as “anti-______” (where ____ is a fundamental cultural value shared by almost all), while also permitting the opposition to argue, again credibly, that the arguing side is unconcerned with arguments for the other _______ (where the other _____ is also a fundamental cultural value) and is therefore opposed to ________.   In a way, these attacks wind up not only being credible, but also accurate – in refusing to even address the implications of a policy for value ________, a side effectively casts that value as not only irrelevant to the specific issue at hand, but as completely devoid of consideration as a legitimate value at all. 

As a means of inciting supporters of one side or another to activism, this is terribly effective; as a means of finding an actual answer to the problem or persuading fence-sitters and opponents, it is almost entirely without value.   It also has another effect: by casting each side as fundamentally anti-_______, it calcifies attitudes between the two sides on other issues that involve value _______ but that are otherwise irrelevant to the specific issue already under debate. 

Scott’s exceptional post this morning, about which I cannot say enough good things, along with Kyle’s excellent response, goes a long way towards advancing this more or less self-evident concept to an understanding of “good” versus “bad” forms of partisanship.  Better, I think it hints at a way out of this morass.  It also explains why I’ve come to hold President Obama in a higher regard than the vast majority of politicians I’ve heard in my lifetime. 

[Read more →]

Freddie writes:

While I continue to believe that our national conversation is far from an equitable or fair one, I have to admit that things have changed; there is more criticism and questioning of Israel and its actions than I would have felt possible before the conflict began.

I wonder if this is the case, actually.  Looking back at the 2006 assault on Lebanon, I recall a great deal of criticism of Israel’s moves, though to be sure, much of it fell within the realm of “is it good for Israel?” or “is it strategically wise?” rather than over the plight of the Lebonese, and Freddie is correct that much of the current criticism of Israel falls within this vein.

I think two things cause Americans to view the Israel/Palestine conflict through this lens.  First, American news media is extraordinarily reluctant to show images of war in too graphic a detail.  I recall the night we invaded Iraq, the Shock and Awe playing on my friend’s television, the green explosions and video-game quality of it all, the surreality of watching a war unfold and yet feeling as though the entire event was little more than another episode in a war game, or a television show.  Shock and Awe certainly sounds like a video game title, or a pay-per-view boxing match.

The fact is, night-vision airstrikes are sterile enough to show on American television.  The fallout from those strikes is not.  So when we are shown images of far-off explosions and told that Israel has moved troops into Gaza to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel, we have that same sterile, pc vision of what the war must be like.  Certainly there are the CNN clips of wounded Palestinians rushed off to ambulances, but even they seem at the most PG-13.  In essence, war seems very abstract, very clean, very distant.

Terrorism, on the other hand, feels very visceral, very real.  We can empathize with those Israeli citizens who have endured terror at the hands of groups like Hamas, who live in fear of attack.  I think 9/11 is largely responsible for this sense of affinity.  Then again, perhaps it is just the nature of terror that makes us so much more able to empathize.  Perhaps because terrorism inspires fear that it could happen to us too, whereas war has always been off-shored for Americans, that makes this our reality.

All of which is to say that perhaps it is the medium by which we get our news that makes us so much more receptive of an Israeli perspective, even when we are criticizing them.  Perhaps it is this and a sense that in some way, either through shared citizenship, shared ideals, or democratic principles, that we are more inclined to view things through a pro-Israel lens.

Of course, the very term “pro-Israel” is a misnomer.  As Freddie mentions, what Israel wants, and what they need may be two very different things.  He writes that:

only America ultimately can broker peace in Palestine. This is because the deep economic, military and diplomatic investment of the United States in Israel gives us the power to deeply influence Israeli policy moving forward. As much as countries like Egypt and Jordan can provide legitimacy in the Palestinian street, and as much as the European Union can act as a powerful third-party arbiter, the simple fact is that there is no other country on earth that has the power and legitimacy within Israel to generally effect change.

Indeed, in every significant move toward peace America has had at least a hand in the matter.  Carter, for all his flaws as President, at least played a part in brokering Israel’s peace with Egypt.  Massive aid packages to Egypt and Jordan from the United States have been instrumental in securing a lasting peace between Israel and those nations.  Always this balanced approach, with America naturally more amicable with Israel than with her neighbors or the Palestinians, but still acting as a broker, as a go-between for the various parties, has worked the best.  Which is why I think Scott is simply on the wrong track when he writes:

That America is in a unique position to help usher along peace negotiations due to its relationship with Israel is indeed essentially indisputable . But I would argue that in many ways, now is the perfect time for America to resist taking that front and centre role and exercise a more “behind the scenes” effect on this conflict.

Just as the Bush administrations refusal to ever deal with so-called enemies, or their stubborness in pushing for democratic elections in Palestine and then refusing to acknowledge the not-so-surprising results, has led to a one-sided and ultimately unhelpful handling of the conflict, I think a “behind the scenes” America would only lead to questions, suspicion, and ultimately illegitimacy in the process.

America needs to do everything out in the open air.  The Obama administration needs to sit down with all sides, even Hamas, and get the dialogue as public as possible.  True, Hamas states in their charter that they will acecpt nothing less than the destruction of Israel.  Very well, then when we sit down with Hamas and with Israel and try to dialogue we can hold that against them.  We can say, “How do you expect us to help you if you don’t renounce this?” and if we do so openly, in the most public matter possible, then the whole world can watch as they either reform, or refuse.

Similarly, America is in a position to ask Israel how they expect to achieve a two-state solution while Israeli settlements stripe the West Bank, and the Israelis will have to respond.  The more open these talks are, the more above-board these diplomatic efforts become, the better.

The media has a role in this as well, by giving us the news in whatever gory detail it may arrive, and letting us truly decide whether this is even a discussion that merits “sides” or not.  Perhaps the end-goal is not pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, but simply pro-peace and an end to the madenning cycle.  Without a newscore willing to show the ugly details, or a Government willing to speak openly with all sides of the debate, how can we hope to achieve anything at all?

UPDATE: This video with Jon Stewart and Al-Jazeera correspondent Abderrahim Foukara is worth watching, and touches on some of these themes.  Note when Foukara mentions that the only country Al-Jazeera has never been shut-down in is Israel.  Perhaps this is another reason we hold them in our esteem–they reflect some of our shared values.