For those of you who weren’t there when I introduced myself a few months ago, I’m a recent graduate of the University of Virginia.  And at the University I majored in “Political & Social Thought,” which is basically an honors interdisciplinary program.  This is all by way of introducing a former classmate, Jia Tolentino, who for the past few months has been blogging/reviewing every book she’s ever read.  Jia is a fantastic writer with a sharp mind and a good sense of humor, and her blog is an absolute pleasure to read (I’m pretty partial to today’s post, which is a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers).  So, if you’re looking for something a little less political to add to your blogroll, you should check it out.

On foreign policy, I’m something of a realist/intervention-skeptic, which is why I’m inclined to agree with Daniel Larison when he argues that democratization isn’t terribly compatible with stability:

Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.

Andrew Sullivan, democracy booster that he is, disagrees:

I don’t buy the argument that in the long run, autocracies are more stable than democracies, even in the Middle East.

Look at Iran. There are enormous risks to over-speedy democratization, especially in the Arab Middle East, but in the long run, democracies, by giving people the ability to vent and protest through nonviolent means are far stabler than the alternative.  It’s how to get from there to here in a minefield full of ancient grievance and weapons of mass destruction that’s the hard part.

I think it’s important here to make a distinction between “democratization” – the process of developing democratic institutions – and “democracy” as a set of institutions and norms.  Larison is absolutely correct to say that democratization is a tremendously destabilizing process; democratic transition is often accompanied by a wholesale abandonment of traditions and norms which maintained some semblance of stability.  And obviously, when we sweep those away in the name of equality, and absent any tradition of respect for minority rights, we – as Larison explains – empower people “with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements.”  It’s not much of a surprise that the collapse of colonialism and subsequent rapid democratization coincided with a terrible epidemic of ethnic violence in the developing world.

I think Sullivan is right to say that in the long-run, democracies (and more importantly, democratic cultures) are far more stable than the alternative, because they do give people the space to protest and resist.  That said, I think he’s being a bit overly optimistic: there’s no guarantee that the instability of democratization will calmly segue into something enduring.  In every case of democratization, there is the very real chance that those initial “birth pangs” (to borrow a phrase from Secretary Rice) will lead to a long-term period of instability and near-chaos for everyone involved. Trying to build a democracy is, in a lot of ways, like looking down the barrel of a gun.

Okay, I meant to put one of these up last week, but I didn’t.  Thankfully, this is a particularly good mix, which will hopefully make up for the fact that I’ve been really derelict in posting these.

Original Song: “Soon” — My Bloody Valentine

1. “Teen Age Riot” — Sonic Youth
2. “Summer Babe [Winter Version]” — Pavement
3. “River Euphrates” — Pixies
4. “Damaged Goods” — Gang of Four
5. “Transmission” — Joy Division
6. “Teen Angst” — M83
7. “KC Accidental” — Broken Social Scene
8. “Dreams Never End” — New Order
9. “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton” — The Flaming Lips
10. “Thursday” – Asobi Seksu

And here, for your enjoyment, are a few of those new fangled “music videos” (for what it’s worth, I think “Damaged Goods” is the best song on this mix):

[Read more →]

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

There’s a part in The Audacity Of Hope, where writing about race, Obama notes that, rightly or wrongly, a significant swath of white people are exhausted, and repeatedly scolding them (even if you’re right) is unlikely to alter the poverty stats. What we need, Obama argued, is a different strategy, one that connects our practical interests with the practical interests of the broader country–less energy on Don Imus and more on Harlem hospital. This sounds like a surrender, but it’s really a re-affirmation of strategy that goes back to Douglass. The point was never to wash white people, (an arrogant pursuit, at any rate) but to free ourselves. My interest in anti-racism is passing. My interest in black people is essential.

As much as I am sympathetic to Ta-Nehisi’s aversion to focusing on anti-racism, I think he is a little too quick to divorce anti-racism from the broader struggle for the practical interests of black people.  That is, if you were going to translate “practical interests of black people” into a legislative program, it would look pretty similar to the platform liberals have been pushing for the better part of a century: universal health care, robust public education, and generous income supports (EITC, unemployment benefits, welfare, etc.).  And so when Obama says that we should connect the practical issues of African-Americans to those of the country, what he means – really – is the opposite: the practical issues of the country are those of black people; and programs designed to benefit the country at large will also benefit (maybe even disproportionately) black people.

But here is where anti-racism and public policy is directly connected.   It’s not just that racial prejudice makes it incredibly difficult to pass legislation that directly addresses problems within minority communities – no, racial prejudice makes it incredibly difficult to pass legislation which directly benefits the majority of Americans.  And most of us know this.  The easiest way to sink an expansion of the welfare state is by attacking it as a give away to African-Americans (or more recently, Hispanic immigrants).  Political scientists have consistently shown that latent prejudice can be “primed” and channeled into a generalized opposition to almost any kind of social spending.  Indeed, the positive relationship between high levels of “racial conservatism” and opposition to the welfare state is one of the closest things to received wisdom that you can find in political science.

More importantly, however, is the fact that actively calling out a racial appeal can serve to defuse its power.  Tali Mendelberg addresses this with considerable detail in her book The Race Card, but it suffices to say that a large part of the power of racial appeals stems from their subtlety.  No one likes to think of themselves as a racist, or even as someone who harbors racial prejudice, and a skillful racial appeal takes account of this by offering a plausible non-racial narrative.  If someone makes the racial narrative explicit (which isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds), it is possible to defuse the appeal, and make its intended targets inclined to reject it.

Insofar that the “anti-racism project” is important, it’s precisely because stopping (or diminishing the force of) racial appeals is an integral part of building support for greater social spending and greater investment in underprivileged communities.  That’s not to say that we should devote much – or any – of our time to the Don Imus’ and Rush Limbaughs of the world, but that advancing the practical interests of the country, and thus the practical interests of black people, requires us to spend real time and devote real energy to pushing against racially negative language and racially negative narratives.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post explaining a few possible ways we could raise revenue, in light of the – as of yet accounted for – long-term structural deficits in the Obama budget.  [Read more →]

Unlike quite a few of my liberal fellow-travelers, I think Megan McArdle is a pretty decent econ-blogger.  That said, she tends to stumble a little bit when it comes to political prognostication:

I now put the chances of a substantial health care bill passing at 75%, and the chances of the Democrats losing the house in 2010 at about 66%. [...]

I think that ramming through the bill on a party line vote makes it very likely that the Democrats will lose the house in 2010; the American public doesn’t like uniparty votes, especially on something this controversial.  A lot of liberals have gotten angry at me for saying this, but it’s not a normative statement; it’s an observation.  IF the Republicans had been willing to push forward on a controversial bill with no Democratic cover, we’d have private social security accounts right now.  But they weren’t, for a reason.

Megan’s right to say that the American people don’t particularly like party-line votes (which is why Obama found success railing against them and other forms of “partisan excess”), but she’s wrong to think that this has any bearing on the public’s electoral preferences.  For the most part, voters are completely uninterested in the details of legislative action; in the eyes of most voters, how something is passed matters far less than whether something is passed.  That is, voters regularly express their preference for bipartisan legislation, but in practice, they could care less about who is responsible for what.  You can see this in how voters apportion blame/success for failed/successful policies: that the Iraq War was a thoroughly bipartisan enterprise had absolutely no bearing on the electoral consequences of the war.  The war was started by a Republican president, and as such, voters hold the Republican Party responsible for its failures.  Likewise, welfare reform was a political winner for Democrats despite the fact that it was largely a Republican initative.

If Democrats ram a health care bill through Congress, I really doubt that it will have any impact on their electoral fortunes, especially if the bill is successful in the short-term.  In that case, any concerns about partisanship will be eclipsed by the fact that Americans really really want health care reform.  Insofar that accusations of partisanship can ever be effective, it’s when the party in question is already unpopular.  Voters will readily accept excessive partisanship as an explanation for failed policies, even if their original dissatisfaction had more to do with the failed policies than it did with any concerns over partisanship (see: Obama 2008).

After I read Ross Douthat’s column this morning, I tweeted that I was nominally on board with his attempt to massage George W. Bush’s reputation.

Three hours, two cups of coffee, and a nice helping of sense later, I think I can safely say that my original assessment was a little…off.  First, here’s Douthat in his own words:

America has had its share of disastrous chief executives. But few have gone as far as Bush did in trying to repair their worst mistakes. Those mistakes were the Iraq war — both the decision to invade and the conduct of the occupation — and the irrational exuberance that stoked the housing bubble. The repairs were the surge, undertaken at a time when the political class was ready to abandon Iraq to the furies, and last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout.

Both fixes remain controversial. But for the moment, both look like the sort of disaster-averting interventions for which presidents get canonized. It’s just that in Bush’s case, the disasters he averted were created on his watch. [...]

And perhaps his best decisions, on the surge and the bailout, were made from the bunker of a seemingly-ruined presidency — when his approval ratings had bottomed out, his credibility was exhausted and his allies had abandoned him.

This is not a blueprint that future presidents will want to follow. But the next time an Oval Office occupant sees his popularity dissolve and his ambitions turn to dust, he can take comfort from Bush’s example. It suggests that it’s possible to become a good president even — or especially — when you can no longer hope to be a great one.

I’m not sure how much of this is the fault of the medium rather than the messenger, but I don’t think Douthat quite grasps the gravity of President Bush’s mistakes.  The Iraq War wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill piece of unfortunate, but easily corrected, policy.  It was – and is – a strategic and humanitarian disaster of the highest order.  Over the course of six years, the United States has squandered trillions of dollars, destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and done almost irreparable damage to Iraq’s social fabric.  In retrospect, the surge was a welcome breath of pragmatism from the Bush administration, but even with that (limited) success in mind, it’s incredibly difficult to say that President Bush “fixed” anything.

The same goes for the financial crisis.  While there’s plenty of blame to go around for the collapse of the housing market and subsequent collapse of the financial system, it’s fair to say that the Bush administration deserves a fair amount of blame for stoking the “irrational exuberance” that in turn stoked the housing bubble.  What’s more, the twin collapses have yielded a tremendous amount of suffering, especially among the poor and working-class.  Since the recession officially began in December 2007, the country has had a net loss of about 5 percent of its non-farm payroll, the brunt of that borne by the most economically insecure members of our society.  The bailouts and TARP were certainly good moves by the administration, and should be recognized as such despite their flaws, but again, to say that those make up for the initial failures is a bit of a stretch.

And I guess that’s my main complaint with Douthat’s column.  To borrow a phrase from President Bush, what Douthat has written is a classic example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Saying that we should applaud President Bush for taking steps to salvage his disastrous presidency is like praising a roommate for cleaning up a bit after trashing the apartment.  Not only should the place never have been trashed to begin with, but cleaning up after oneself is a matter of course and not particularly praiseworthy.

Update: I left out a pretty critical part of the Douthat column.

Matt Zeitlin’s post on 9/11 is top notch, and I recommend that you read it.  Here’s an excerpt:

One would hope that America’s size, strength and influence would breed a certain sense of responsibility and humility, an awareness of how our actions affect the entire world, for good as well as evil. Instead, we had a political class intent on war and the nullification of our the principles that are the supposed bedrock of our nation. Instead of tempering our anger and fear and distrust, they played on it.

The media and the public, instead of being wary of demagogues who use times of fear to advance nefarious ends, were enthralled with the idea of projecting power and strength, with little care for the consequences we’d bring upon ourselves or inflict on to others. We were hurt and humiliated, but not chastened.

I’m not particularly good at writing memorials or tributes, but I agree with Matt’s basic sentiment.  So, in honor of those who lost their lives on 9/11, as well as the countless Americans, Afghans and Iraqis who have lost their lives since, here is a particularly pertinent quote from Reinhold Niebuhr:

For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster.  The primary cause would be that the strength of a great nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.

This isn’t really part of the conversation anymore, especially now that Congress and the president have taken it off the table, but it’s worth reminding folks that we could cover a good chunk of the cost of health care reform by simply raising taxes on the highest earners. [Read more →]

Read Bruce Bartlett.  I mean, right now. [Read more →]

Creepy admiration for China’s authoritarian government aside, the main point of Tom Friedman’s most recent New York Times op-ed is actually pretty sound: the United States has become something of a neutered one-party democracy.  That is, for those interested in governing – at least on the national level – the Democratic Party really is the only game in town, as the conservative movement’s staunchly anti-government approach has left us with a Republican Party as hyper-ideological as it is lacking in policy expertise.  But because our political institutions are designed around consensus, this makes it incredibly difficult for a single party – even one with clear majority support – to make an enact policy, as consensus requires a good-faith governing partner, which the Democrats simply don’t have.  Of course, this is made all the more problematic by the fact that the nation is facing challenges – nuclear proliferation, climate change, fiscal unsustainability – which require much broader action than what our institutions are actually capable of.

The only thing I’d add to Friedman’s analysis is Chris’ observation – made in the comments – that it is a little inaccurate to describe the Democratic Party as singular or unified in any ideological sense.  In reality, or at least as far as congressional Democrats are concerned, the Democratic Party is more of a loose coalition between a broadly center-left party (based in the Northeast and the West Coast) and a broadly center-right party (based in the Rust Belt, and rural areas throughout the West, Midwest, and the South).  For liberals, this isn’t particularly good.  Under a functional legislative system, where majority rule was given deference, this wouldn’t pose too much of a problem; the center-left party could rely on the center-right party to help craft and pass broadly acceptable legislation (while the right-wing party languished in irrelevance).  The way it stands however, the right-wing party has pretty significant veto power over nearly every piece of legislation, which effectively means that any given piece of progressive legislation has to go through two conservative filters.

To take it back to Friedman’s point though, the fact of our tri-party legislature acts as yet another obstacle to one-party governing, since there simply isn’t enough ideological cohesion and group loyalty within the Democratic Party to pass anything approaching ambitious legislation.  The real solution, of course, is a complete restructuring of our legislature into something approaching a Westminster-style parliamentary system, with multiple member districts and executive branch drawn largely from the legislature.  However, since that is also incredibly unlikely, we’ll probably have to look for other ways to make Congress more responsive to the majority party (like eliminating the filibuster, or revamping the committee system!).

Generally, I’m loath to give the Bush administration credit for much of anything, but if there is one thing they got right, it’s in their approach to passing legislation.  President Bush and his advisers realized, correctly, that the partisan make-up of any given vote matters far less than what Beltway insiders normally think.  It doesn’t particularly matter if X piece of legislation has bipartisan support so much as it matters that X piece of legislation is popular.  The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson seems to get this, and makes a strong case for passing partisan legislation:

The rule among politicians in Washington used to be that when the provincials become restless, as they are now, the safest thing to do is run to the center. But as this sour and unsettled summer ends, the political center looks like the white line running down the middle of a busy street — a foolish place to stand and an excellent place to get run over. [...]

It is a core belief of Washington’s political culture that policymaking by compromise — “meeting in the middle” — is the way to gain and keep the support of the vast, moderate, essentially reasonable group of voters who constitute a coherent political center. My problem with this analysis is that so many of the big decisions that have to be made are binary: yes or no. The terrain in the middle consists only of “maybe” or “kind of,” and I see no evidence that the country is in a “maybe” or “kind of” mood.

Of course, the obvious response is that Bush’s method of passing legislation resulted in Republicans losing both houses of Congress and the presidency.  But I’m not sure if that’s actually the case; Republican losses last year and in 2006 had far more to do with the party’s failed policies and its obstinate refusal to change course on Iraq than it did with institutional minutiae and partisan composition of floor votes.  One could easily imagine a scenario in which various pieces of conservative legislation were wildly successful, and voters rewarded the Republicans with continued control of Congress, even if that legislation was completely partisan.

Plainly put, the “center” does not lead the political conversation, the “poles” do.  It’s simply a fact that during the past twenty-plus years of conservative dominance, the “center” reflected the strength of the conservative movement.  Accordingly, if Democrats want to gain and keep the support “of the vast, moderate, essentially reasonable group of voters who constitute a coherent political center,” the answer isn’t to propose mealy-mouthed “centrist” policies and hope that voters understand the underlying differences between that and a more liberal proposal, instead, it’s to move full-on with the most effective legislation possible, which in health care at least, happens to be the most liberal form of the legislation.  After all, Democrats won’t be punished for partisanship, they’ll be punished for failure.