I don’t really have anything insightful to add to Hendrik Hertzberg’s most recent post, but this is certainly worth repeating: [Read more →]

Over at Stuff White People Do, Nikki has a great guest post explaining one of the tactics (some) white people use to justify or explain their opposition to affirmative action and other forms of “reverse racism”:

Usually when I hear these sorts of lines from white people, they are offered in explanation of why they vehemently oppose affirmative action, or any other race-based help/“handouts” for people of color. Their justification, in most cases, is this insistence on their own helplessness to change history, and their unwillingness to “pay” or be “held responsible” for it.

The way they tell it, they, too, are victims of unjust, ignorant, and/or racist white ancestors — because they, white Americans living today, are the unfortunate ones who must deal with affirmative action, “reverse racism,” and angry, greedy people of color. Sure, black people suffered tremendously under slavery, but many white people now feel that they are the oppressed ones, paying unfairly for “the sins of the fathers.”

[...]

We reap what others have sown before us, and that includes deep mistrust, prejudice, and racism. And we do bear the burden, as their descendants — and the only people with the power to change anything now — to try to right at least some of the wrongs. It’s time to challenge all the people of our generation who want to simply wash their hands of history. Why should we expect to be excused from addressing this injustice, and working to eradicate it, even if we are not the ones “directly responsible” for it?

This is of course all speculation, but something tells me that part of the reason why Americans have such a problem dealing with the past is that it flies in the face of our belief in the ability of an individual, a community or a nation to reinvent itself.  As a general matter, Americans don’t like to believe that we are just as weighted down and just as captured by the past as everyone else.  The past is there, yes, but it’s something to honored or disregarded, not dwelled upon.

The simple act of acknowledging institutional racism requires an explicit rejection of that idea.  Indeed, we’re no longer allowed to avoid the injustices of the past — not only do we have to pay attention to the actions of our forefathers, but we also are required to recognize that our forefathers still have enduring influence over the shape of our society.  The only way to really understand – and thus work against – institutional racism then is to dwell on the stories and tragedies of the past and really grapple with our history of racism and apartheid. Then-candidate Obama tried to say as much in his “race” speech last year, but I’m not sure if it actually resonated, beyond the fact that everyone was impressed with his not-really-that-impressive use of a Faulkner quote (admittedly one that holds a lot of resonance for this conversation).

Update: Edited for clarity and quality.

The forthcoming issue* of Reason features an exceedingly thoughtful essay by Kerry Howley, in which she argues that libertarianism would be well-served by widening its scope and paying far more attention to infringements on liberty that are the product of cultural forces.  It’s an argument familiar to those of us versed in sociological or anthropological discourse: namely, that systematic cultural conditions can have just as much of an impact on restricting individual liberty as any expansion of the state’s power.  In the process of defending Howley’s critique, Will Wilkinson notes that a fair number of libertarians don’t really seem to get the core substance of Howley’s point:

If you think cultural products such as political ideologies evolve over time, you won’t see the content of “libertarianism” as sharply defined and fixed once and for all. To assert, as Ilya does, that “some cultural issues might well be appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism,” pretty much begs the question. The claim is that these cultural issues ought to be objects of concern to libertarians because they are matters of liberty that libertarian have overlooked. Kerry’s asking libertarians to care more about the conditions under which people develop the capacity to meaningfully exercise freedom. She’s asking libertarians to not so blithely assume that social relations of exploitation and domination enforced by state power for hundreds of years are no longer matters of liberty simply because the enforcement of longstanding racist and sexist norms was privatized a few decades ago. She’s not asking libertarians to save the whales.

As you’re wondering why it is that so many commentators have had a hard time getting Kerry’s core point, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that libertarianism – as a political movement – is overwhelmingly white and male.  We tend to think of the racial composition of a political movement as just having electoral consequences, but it also has a profound effect on the core ideology of said movement.  At the risk of oversimplifying a bit, marginalized voices – racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays, etc. – are overrepresented among liberals and as such, the left that has been forced to grapple with the issues and concerns of marginalized communities in such a way as to make liberalism better equipped to deal with these issues.

It seems that insofar that libertarians experience oppression or constraints on their liberty, it is through the actions of the state rather than through culture, which makes sense. Libertarians are overwhelmingly white and male, and in a culture which highly values whiteness and maleness, they will face relatively fewer overt cultural constraints on their behavior than their more marginalized fellow-travelers.  Or in other words, a fair number of libertarians are operating with a good deal of unexamined privilege, and it’s this, along with the extremely small number of women and minorities who operate within the libertarian framework, which makes grappling with cultural sources of oppression really hard for libertarians.  After all – socially speaking – being a white guy in the United States isn’t exactly hard and that’s doubly true if you are well off.

*Has it already come out?

Via Sociological Images is this pretty awesome “pro-capitalist” propaganda cartoon from 1948:

The Miller Center of Public Affairs (my employer) is holding a conference on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as such, I spent most of my Monday night at a work-related dinner with prominent IR scholars and Cold War historians.  Most of the folks at my table taught at large universities, and unsurprisingly, they spent a fair amount of time discussing/complaining about how hard it is to really make undergraduates understand the fear and paranoia that defined the early Cold War era.  Although they generally agreed that it was an exercise in futility (my protests didn’t really have an impact), the professor sitting next to me did acknowledge that he had found some success by simply giving his students a brief economic history of the Soviet Union, from its creation in the early 1920s to the end of the Second World War.  As the professor explained it, if you do that, it’s actually very easy to see why U.S. policymakers were terrified of the Soviet system and it’s implications for the rest of the world.

In less than a generation, the Soviet Union – formerly a poor, agrarian society – ballooned into an industrial powerhouse with the military might to successfully stop* what was then the most well-equipped and well-led army on the planet.  What’s more, the Soviet Union’s command economy didn’t seem to have a negative impact on growth rates.  Indeed, the Soviet economy grew briskly for a good portion of the early post-war period, convincing many American elites – even industrialists – that at least for developing countries, the Soviet approach had real merit**.  This is why you see cartoons like the one above – at the time, most of the available evidence supported the idea that the Soviet system was a reasonable alternative.  And since the Western world was only a few years removed from the almost total collapse of capitalism (as well as the prospect of left-wing revolution) it was important to impress upon people the benefits of capitalism and the deficiencies of Soviet-style command economics.

*Americans mythologize the Second World War in such a way as to almost completely discount the contributions of the Soviets/Russians.  In fact, calling them “contributions” doesn’t come close to doing the Russians Soviets justice; Germany unleashed the vast majority of its military might against the Soviet Union, sending nearly 80 percent of its combat divisions to rampage across Russia.  The Soviet Union fought and destroyed the vast majority of said divisions – 4.3 million German soldiers were killed or wounded on the Eastern Front – at an unfathomable cost to itself.  Wikipedia puts Soviet military casualties at approximately 10.5 million and Soviet civilian casualties (within postwar borders) at 15.7 million.  Or, put another way, if the Soviet Union hadn’t joined the war effort, its safe to assume that most of Western Europe would have ended up as part of a greater Germany.

**There is a reason why large, developing countries like China and India aligned themselves with the Soviet Union – the command and control thing really did seem to work.

Update: Edited for clarity.

E.D. has a new post up at his True/Slant digs asking why John McCain hasn’t done much to participate in the health care debate.  I don’t have much to say about the main substance of the post, but this bit did stick out to me:

Sure, there are plenty of obstacles to disrupting the status quo.

For one thing, big labor opposes just about any move toward killing the status quo, because it gives them quite a lot more bargaining power. Employer-provided benefits, sheltered from income taxes, are good for the unions. They’re good for big businesses, too, or at least they were until health care costs began to spiral out of control.

Taking on “Big Labor” is pretty fashionable around these parts and that’s understandable: most of the Leaguers are on the right side of the spectrum, and for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, hating on unions is a conservative past-time.  But in the interest of fairness, I think it’s worth pointing out that unions have good reason for wanting to maintain their bargaining power: for almost thirty years, they’ve been left to the mercies of employers and forced to deal with a federal government that was mostly cavalier about enforcing labor law.  Indeed, one of the conservative fruits of the Reagan revolution was a crippled Department of Labor that either didn’t have the resources to address labor law violations or routinely ignored them.  What’s more, with private sector union density at a historically low 7.6 percent, unions no longer have the power to resist the pressure of employers and contend with a neglectful federal government.

With that in mind, I don’t know why anyone is shocked and scandalized to see unions oppose policies which would cost their members health care benefits and thus reduce their bargaining power, even if those policies are ultimately good for unions and their members.  Unions don’t have much of a reason to trust the government, and they especially don’t have much of a reason to trust a bill that has the support of companies and organizations that are openly hostile to unions.  Is their opposition dangerously short-sighted? Yes.  But contra E.D., it isn’t particularly sinister.

Via Megan McArdle is this interesting graph from the Congressional Budget Office showing the impact the recession has had on tax revenues, organized by type of tax:

I am also surprised to see that revenue from payroll taxes has essentially remained stable through the recession, and like Megan, I’m not entirely sure as to why that is (and if anyone wants to hazard a guess, I am all ears).

What’s more interesting to me though, is what this graph implies about the volatility of revenue.  Assuming that this is an accurate representation of what happens to tax revenues during a recessionary period, it seems to suggest that our most progressive taxes – income taxes – are most vulnerable to the effects of a recession, while our most regressive taxes – payroll taxes – are our least volatile sources of revenue.  And if that’s true, then it has powerful implications for progressive policies.

Since Obama entered office, I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that, above nearly everything else, progressives need to make a concerted effort to change the way we talk about taxation, in the interest of clearing the space for politicians to talk honestly and openly about raising revenue.  After all, we don’t have much of choice.  Most progressives are committed to significantly broadening the scope of the American welfare state; health care is only one part of what is a long-term effort to bring the United States more in line with our European peers in terms of what the state delivers to its citizens.  Taxation plays a critical role in furthering that project.  We simply can’t expand the welfare state without also raising dramatically more revenue than we currently do, since in the absence of any additional revenue, the United States cannot afford much beyond its current obligations (or rather it could, but it’s nice to be able to pay for what we spend).

The problem for progressives is twofold: first, we have to find a way of successfully countering the conservative narrative that taxes are unfair at best and borderline illegitimate at worst, and second, we have to find methods of taxation that are both fair and capable of raising an adequate amount of revenue.

Of the two, I actually think that the second is a far more difficult project, in part because the best solution – a value-added tax of some form – is anathema to a lot of progressives. For progressives, the VAT is simply too regressive; every imaginable form of the VAT would disproportionately affect poor, working-class and middle-class Americans.  That said, there are ways to craft a VAT as to soften its impact.  For starters, you could include exemptions for food and non-luxury clothing items, as well as use some of the revenue – Bruce Barlett estimates that a 20 percent tax could raise up to $1 trillion per year in 2009 dollars – to provide income supports for struggling Americans.  Indeed, if you buy the idea (which I do) that progressive distribution is far more important than progressive taxation, then a VAT is great by progressive standards, as the revenue generated could be used to support both a stronger safety net and significant investment into education and infrastructure.  What’s more, the stability of regressive taxes makes it more likely that you can expand the welfare state while also keeping it fiscally solvent over the long-term.

I don’t expect conservatives to sign on to this project (though it’s worth noting that the United States wouldn’t be the first nation to trade conservative taxation for progressive spending), but I think it’s something they should consider.  If you believe – as I do – that the United States is on a pretty steady march towards a much stronger public sector, then we must raise revenues one way or another.  Considering the alternatives – massive tax hikes on the rich, which depending on the form they take, I’m not necessarily opposed to – a VAT is probably the best possible outcome for conservatives.

In an otherwise decent piece about Harry Reid’s continuing attempt to corral support for the public option, this paragraph sticks out like a sore thumb:

Just six weeks ago the public option appeared to be dying, under fierce attack by the insurance industry. A clear majority of Democratic senators favor a government-run plan. But public statements by other senators indicate that the proposal lacks the 60 votes ordinarily needed to secure Senate approval for hotly contested legislation. [Emphasis mine]

The problem, of course, is that there is nothing ordinary about this 60 vote requirement.  “Hotly contested legislation” – like any other piece of legislation – requires the support of only a simple majority to become law, and that’s been the case for the vast majority of American legislative history.  In fact, and as congressional expert Norm Ornstein explained earlier this year, this extra-constitutional 60 vote requirement is a relatively recent development, with the number of cloture motions growing steadily over the past thirty years, with a particularly sharp spike during the 110th Congress:

That we’ve basically acclimated to this new 60-vote requirement without much in the way of protest is really a sad commentary on our politics: we’ve gotten so used to legislative inaction that its institutionalization really isn’t that big of deal.  That said, even if we were eliminate the filibuster and make the Senate a more majoritarian institution, it would still be functionally broken.  The Senate is simply too unrepresentative and too powerful to not have an incredibly strong status-quo bias.

If the Senate were something akin to the House of Lords, hidebound and sort of useless but without real power or influence, it would still be really annoying but not terribly critical.  As it stands however, we live with the worst possible arrangement: the Senate is both dysfunctional and an integral part of the legislative process.

And predictably, it’s filled with distortions, half-truths and misrepresentations (full transcript here): [Read more →]

As much as I hate to say it, Newt Gingrich does have a point here:

Through my experience as Speaker of the House and building a Republican majority in 1994, I have learned that if America wants a conservative majority in Washington, parts of that majority are going to disagree. I was elected Speaker because a number of moderates voted for me. They gave us control of the House for the first time in forty years, allowing us to balance the federal budget, cut taxes and reform welfare for America.

My endorsement of Dede Scozzafava in the special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional District is a means of regaining a conservative majority in America.

[...]

My number one interest in the 2009 elections is to build a Republican majority. If your interest is taking power back from the Left, and your interest is winning the necessary elections, then there are times when you have to put together a coalition that has disagreement within it. [Emphasis mine]

Not too long ago, Rod Dreher observed that there isn’t really a liberal equivalent to the epithet “RINO,” and he’s right.  Democrats generally understand that a (D) is a (D), and that while it might be difficult to corral an ideologically heterodox party into supporting specific legislation, the ideological compromises are  – by and large – worth it.  That is, for all the complaining liberals like to do about Blue Dog Democrats (and I count myself among the complainers), it is simply a fact that the majority of seats won over the past two election cycles have come from conservative districts.  And while this hasn’t been great for moving forward on liberal initiatives, it does have the advantage of allowing liberal Democrats – who make up most of the leadership – to set the legislative agenda.

There are two big things I think conservative activists are missing in their relentless campaign against Republican moderates: the first is that those moderates are a necessary part of building a nationally viable Republican Party.  The simple fact is that in a large democracy, there can be only so much ideological coherence in a two party system.  Newt Gingrich, to his credit, understands this and realizes that in order to build a stronger GOP, the leadership is going to have to do far more to accommodate moderates within the Republican coalition.  What’s more, Gingrich also seems to grasp that this isn’t a zero-sum game for conservatives.  At the moment, most of the GOP’s leadership is reliably conservative.  Successfully retaking Congress, even if it requires empowering a few moderates, means that those conservatives are once again in a position to control the legislative agenda.

The simple fact is that conservatives need moderates to pass conservative legislation.  And while hyper-ideologues might not particularly like that, they are going to have to live with it.

*Yes that is a reference to that terrible Linkin Park song.  No, I will not link to it.

This is a good point (via Cogitamus):

As long as there was still a good distance to go before a bill was passed, Business Dog Dems could afford to be Business Dogs – to maintain the charade of being Democrats by being on the side of passing something, while watering it down to please the people who write their campaign checks, and hoping that the bill would die a quiet death amidst all the wrangling.  So they didn’t have to think much about how it would play out in 2010 if the bill passed, because that was a pretty damned big ‘if.’

Not so much anymore.  So now they’re having to think about passing a bill that they can defend to their constituents when the GOP tries to put the worst face on it that they can.  And that means strengthening the bill so that the GOP doesn’t have much to work with.

I made a similar point to my boss earlier this morning.  In terms of their opposition, the GOP has all but thrown caution to the wind and adopted a high-risk/high-reward strategy, both politically and legislatively.   Successfully shutting down Barack Obama’s health care reform effort would have dealt a crippling blow to his presidency and virtually guaranteed significant Republican gains in next year’s elections.

The huge downside of course, is that if Democrats do pass health care legislation – and that’s looking increasingly likely – then it becomes that much harder to run against them in next year’s elections.  What’s more, and as we’re seeing now, the flip side to obstinacy is that your interests won’t be represented.  Even moderate Republican input into a health care bill would have yielded one significantly more conservative than what we’re likely to see.  Democrats seemed to have genuinely wanted a bipartisan bill, and I’m fairly certain that a right-leaning “compromise” bill would have been quickly shepherded through Congress.  As it stands, not only do Democrats not have any incentive to take Republican input, but the logic of the situation is pushing them in a more liberal direction.  That is, and as low-tech cyclist points – with a bill looking very likely, even conservative Democrats recognize that their best bet for winning reelection involves strengthening the bill to make it a better deal for their constituents.  And on top of that, liberal activists are pressuring the Democratic leadership to include a public option and there seems to be a sense that liberals will actively turn against the leadership if a public option isn’t included.

The funny thing about all of this is that by categorically opposing reform, Republicans have made it far more likely that they will suffer a serious legislative loss in the form of a solidly center-left health are bill, and that in turn makes it far more likely that they suffer politically in next year’s elections.

Sometimes I wonder if Slate knows that they’re being ripped off by Christopher Hitchens.  After all, he’s been writing the same two columns for while now: either he complains about how oppressive it is that he has to share space with religious people, or he’s blasting liberals for not being “serious” enough to support the indiscriminate killing of Arabs and/or Muslims.  This week’s column is in the latter category:

But spastic missiles and low-yield nukes can still ruin the whole day of a neighboring state, as well as make a travesty of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and such international laws and treaties as are left to us. Thus, if it is true that Iran is not as close to “break-out” as we have sometimes feared, should that not make our deliberations more urgent rather than less? Might it not mean, in effect, that now is a better time to disarm the mullahs than later?

The rest of the column continues along these lines: “if liberals are opposed to attacks on repressive regimes on the basis of potential harm to us, then said liberals should support an attack earlier on in the timeline, when said regimes are relatively weaker.”  As Matt Steinglass correctly points out, this is nonsense – both on its merits and as a characterization of liberal opposition to the United States’ various foreign interventions.  Liberal opposition to the Iraq War – to use one notable instance – wasn’t rooted in any fear of “the awesome power” that Saddam Hussein had at hand.  It was based in two perfectly sensible observations: first, Saddam Hussein had done nothing that would warrant military retaliation, thus making the entire project illegal and immoral, and second, our utopian plan to build a stable, democratic Iraq was doomed to failure, if only because the United States doesn’t have the capacity or the power to completely transform a society from the ground up.  Steinglass’ take is worth quoting here:

Those of us who didn’t want to invade Iraq tended to focus on the fact that invading a country that hasn’t attacked you, or really even done anything that would constitute a legitimate provocation, is illegal, because it’s illegal, and immoral, because it entails killing a lot of people (including children) for no good reason, and foolish, because it leads to consequences that may spiral horrifically out of control in unpredictable ways.

Furthermore, Hitchen’s logic simply doesn’t hold up*.  We aren’t required to attack Iran because it is relatively weaker; the fact that Iran isn’t strong enough to retaliate in any meaningful way only means that attacking is a slightly more viable option among many other options.  Diplomacy is still feasible, as are sanctions and what not.

That said, I’m always amused/deeply depressed by what counts as “acceptable” in our elite discourse.  It is perfectly OK for Christopher Hitchens – or anyone, really – to euphemistically call for the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of civilians.  Indeed, doing so marks you as a serious member of the political elite.  This point has been made many times before, but there has not – and never will be – any social or professional sanction for the scores of pundits who clamored for the United States to go to war in Iraq.  And in the case of someone like Bill Kristol, who bears direct responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, their enthusiasm was met with overwhelming professional success.  By contrast, you are liable to be permanently banished from respectable circles if you so much as suggest that war for war’s sake is deeply immoral, if not a bad idea.

Indeed, the same goes for a whole host of critical issues.  When a group of overly-parochial, self-interested politicians work together to block climate change legislation, they are lauded by most in the news media as courageous moderates.  But in reality, it might be more accurate to describe them as borderline sociopaths.  After all, their actions – or lack thereof – will directly contribute to the preventable deaths of tens of millions of people who had the misfortune of A) being born deeply impoverished and B) living near the coast.  That they show almost no remorse about this is deeply troubling and absolutely reprehensible, to say the least.  Roughly 45,000 Americans will die for lack of health insurance, and its treated as a minor data-point rather than the big fucking deal that it is.

I honestly don’t really know where I’m going with this.  The short of it is that I am very – very – tired of our political culture’s moral glibness.  I’m tired of people who treat politics as a game to be won and loss and not as a serious endeavor with real consequences for real people.  And I’m tired of watching brave voices – from across the political spectrum – get pushed aside for refusing to treat politics as a game.  As it stands, if you use your influence to push our system to do right by its citizens, then you’re dismissed as naive or “shill.”  But if you have the courage and integrity to defend the government’s campaign of torture and disappearance, or solemnly advocate for the indiscriminate slaughter of brown people, then well, God better watch out because the sky’s the limit.

</end tirade>

In his column today, David Brooks makes an error which I think is pretty common of conservative commentators who look to Great Britain for political inspiration.  But first, Brooks:

The Conservatives have treated British voters as adults for a year now, with a string of serious economic positions. The Conservatives supported the Labour government bank bailout, even though it was against their political interest to do so. Last November, Osborne opposed a cut in the value-added taxes on the grounds that the cuts were unaffordable and would not produce growth. It is not easy for any conservative party to oppose tax cuts, but this one did it. [...]

Osborne and David Cameron, the party leader, argue that Labour’s decision to centralize power has undermined personal and social responsibility. They are offering a responsibility agenda from top to bottom. Decentralize power so local elected bodies have responsibility. Structure social support to encourage responsible behavior and responsible spending.

If any Republican is looking for a way forward, start by doing what they’re doing across the Atlantic.

What Brooks doesn’t seem to get in his analysis - and what Matt Yglesias does seem to get in his - is that even with the considerable differences between the Conservative and Labour parties, there still exists a fair amount of consensus in British politics, especially regarding first-order concerns over the role of government.  That is, on a foundational level, British liberals and British conservatives still agree on the basics: government can serve the better the welfare of its citizens, the state is empowered to provide a minimum level of safety and security, etc.  Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are usually grouped together as contemporaries, but for all of her reactionary rhetoric, Thatcher wasn’t on a crusade to undermine the welfare state.

Reagan, however, was.  This might be boilerplate for most everyone here, but it’s worth reemphasizing: the Reagan Revolution didn’t just herald the end of the New Deal coalition, it also heralded the end of the New Deal consensus.  Reagan’s rise and victory signalled the end of a Republican Party that was – at core – in broad agreement with the Democratic Party about the role government.  With Reagan at its helm, the GOP transformed into a conservative movement dedicated to doing as much as it could to undermine and dismantle the welfare state.

Now, on some level, this was a necessary correction to the excesses of the 1970s.  But, when thinking about contemporary politics, it leaves the GOP in a much different place vis a vis the Democratic Party than the Conservative Party is vis a vis Labour.  Osborne and Cameron can use government to pursue conservative policy ends because the Tories never abandoned the idea that government can serve to improve the lives of its citizens.  The real disagreement between British liberals and conservatives is in the extent to which government should.  By contrast, Republicans have explicitly rejected the idea that government can be a force for good.  Which, policy wise, leaves them in a bit of a bind: not only does it encourage an almost criminal negligence to the operation of government (see: Bush Administration), but it virtually eliminates the space for certain kinds of policymaking.  For instance, Yglesias mentions that the Conservative Party fully signed on to the idea that climate and energy are issues which Britain must tackle (the same is true of center-right parties on the continent).  From there, he suggests that the GOP would have a bit more success electorally if it could do the same.  And I think that’s true.  But when you have a near-resolute opposition to government, it’s a little difficult to tackle problems which require government intervention (I’m oversimplifying a bit, but you get the picture).

The problem with Brooks’ recommendation then isn’t that it is a bad one, because it isn’t.  The Republican Party – and the country – would be better off if it adopted a pragmatic, flexible and mature approach towards governing.  No, the problem with Brooks’ suggestion is that it ignores the reality of the contemporary conservative movement, its near-death grip on the Republican Party, and its absolute opposition to the idea of government.  The GOP can’t build a Cameronite consensus with the Democratic Party because, at this point in time, there really isn’t much of a consensus.