Some hail the 1950s as America’s golden decade.  It was boom time in America, and like the Big Automakers, Big Government continued what was begun during the Great Depression, adding notches to the belt of the New Deal through expansions of Social Security and other entitlement programs, culminating the next decade with the passage of Medicare.  Times were good for American manufacturing during the post-war years as well, and America looked to be on its way toward perpetual prosperity.

However, the intervening years have been more of a mixed bag for Americans.  Free trade and globalization as well as the constant advancement in technology have led to an entirely different workforce than the one we had six decades ago.  Similarly, immigration, the civil rights movement, and the society-wide integration of women into the labor force have changed the face of American jobs entirely.  Many people look at all these changes and point only to free trade or globalization as the culprits in trying to understand why the world has changed so drastically, but this misses all these other changes which have occurred since the days when American made vehicles were really the only ones to choose from, and the concept of a two-income household was as strange as the idea of rearing children out of wedlock.

So what would have changed if the American people had decided to enact protectionist policies instead of free trade agreements?  And to what extent would we have needed to go to maintain the sort of civil society we had in 1950 or 1960?  Could we have, through protectionist and greater redistributive policies, created a society wherein the same level of economic prosperity and indeed preeminence could have continued to present day while at the same time bringing minorities and women into the work-force?  Would this be possible (is it possible even now?) to sustain without also maintaining a large, even global standing army?

Furthermore, to what degree is the perceived prosperity of the 50’s and 60’s in fact merely an illusion of the ‘good ol’ days’?  There is a widespread belief that this was an era of prosperity, and that in recent times people have become worse off, poorer, less able to achieve the American dream.  A college degree is the new high school degree.  There are not as many good blue collar jobs, etc.  But could we have enacted policies to counter this?  Could we have kept the lumber jobs, the fishing jobs, the manufacturing jobs?  What policies would this have demanded?  Less strict environmental regulations, to begin with. Some cap on innovation of new technology.  Much higher taxes, and very strict protectionist policies.  The protection, even, of very big corporations against competition – especially automakers, but other industries as well, such as telecommunications.  Then the question becomes, what would have been the side-effect of these policies?

These are the questions we need to ask when we begin to question free trade.  It is only one component in the change the world has undergone in recent decades.  Many of the changes are far more egalitarian in nature.  How much has the two-income family had an effect on home prices – effectively pricing out single-income families from the housing market?  How much has federal tuition assistance led to much higher college tuition?  The dead lumber towns are the result of legislation aimed to save forests.  And on and on.

So went the agrarian society.  So goes manufacturing.  Why staff a mail room full of mail runners and sorters when machines can do it better?  Why hire elevator operators when elevators are pretty easy to operate on our own?  Why charge more for a product, when you can undercut your competitor by making large capital investments in computers and machinery which save on costs in the long run?  In the end all these changes lead to a new sort of economy, and they can be a painful process, but there is really no stemming the tide.

Certainly the cost of stemming the tide would be much greater than merely enacting some stricter tariffs.  I don’t think economic populists have a clear vision of the America they imagine could be preserved through protectionism, or a good handle on the lengths such protectionism would truly need to go to do the trick.

P.S. – all this being said, I think that Randian advocacy of markets with no regulation, etc. is at least as Utopian.  Few people actually believe that no regulation would be the best policy, only that regulation should be efficient and limited because it is subject to capture and manipulation.  Also, this is not really an argument against taxes or anything of that nature.  Countries like the Netherlands or Denmark have very free trade and very high taxes, managing to keep government out of the economy while still providing strong safety nets (indeed, perhaps too strong!)  The trick, I think, is figuring out how to maintain as much economic liberty as possible while still providing effective state services and safety nets.  This is impossible when both parties spend all their time talking past one another or come up with healthcare plans that are “bipartisan” only inasmuch as they are good ideas stripped down to rather watery ones, diluted to the point of being almost entirely worthless.

While reading Megan McArdle’s interesting pair of posts on “non-practicing” pedophiles, I was struck by the thought that the tone of the posts perfectly captured the attitude of a certain segment of society perhaps half a century ago towards homosexuals:

This changed a lot of the way that I think about pedophiles.  I used to use the kind of hyperbole one often hears–that people who look at child porn “should be shot” and so forth.  I don’t say those things any more.

Obviously, I am not going to defend the use of child porn at all; it’s despicable, and jail is the appropriate sentence, because the man who purchases child pornography is encouraging its manufacture.  But it made me think of them for the first time with sympathy.  They didn’t choose to be like this–God, who would?

The brief legal justification McArdle offers is why there isn’t a slippery-slope argument to be made here. We are fairly sure as a society, or so at least we tell ourselves, that consent is the operative moral variable in sexual relations, and since the consent of children is understood to be deficient, child pornography is always something akin to rape. So, I don’t think another half-century will bring about the normalization of child pornography, though there have been changes in sexual mores equally strange and sudden in the past. I’m more interested in the way the evolution of views about sexuality can repeat itself. McArdle’s posts, along with the Dan Savage letter she links to, represent the second step in the process of recognizing people who have certain desires as constituting a group. With the caveat that I haven’t undertaken a Foucault-like cultural history of homosexuality, from a survey of medical texts and pre-war analogues to gay rights movements it seems to me that this process occurred in the United States sometime around the middle of the last century with regard to homsexuality.

Of course homosexuality in the sense of same-sex sexual acts has been around at least since Homer and probably much longer, but the notion that there is a class of people who experience permanent desire for members of the opposite sex in a manner analogous to the ordinary kind of love and desire between men and women is relatively recent, even if such people may have always existed (not that the forms of heterosexual attraction are stable throughout time and place; C.S. Lewis once wrote that the idea of romantic love was invented by a group of poets living in 12th-century France, and pace Ovid, I almost believe him). Specifically, while the idea of homosexuality has its origins in the Mollies of the 18th century and the Dandies of the 19th, it required the post-war mania for cataloging and extirpating deviancy by rational-technical means to sunder those terms from broader ideas about decadence, aestheticism, Continentalism and Catholicism, which were occasionally unified and apotheosized in infamous figures like Huysmans. Part of this cataloging and extirpation process was the identification of homosexuals as a sub-set of the population who were like other people except with respect to this single pathology. This made its way into general opinion in odd, quasi-medical ways, but the general sentiment directed towards this newly invented population, I gather, was not unlike the way we feel about pedophiles today: a covert, unspeakable menace threatening our children in the midst of us.

Of course the only appropriate response to that situation, when some group is made an object of universal horror by reason of presumably unchosen desire, is McArdle’s. She suggests compassion for the “non-practicing” pedophiles:

Society should gather round to help them… give them other ways to channel the energy they aren’t pouring into molesting kids, and substitutes for the emotional succor that most of us hope to get from our partners.

Instead, we’re so revolted and afraid that we wall them into themselves, and probably make it more likely that they’ll do something terrible.

This response further solidifies the reality of an identity constituted by a permanent, unchosen desire, and in seeking to make the object of hatred an object of compassion brings the object further into being.

With regard to homosexuality we are still undergoing the third step in the process, which is the move from twinned compassion and hatred for a group constituted by pathological desire to tolerance of a group constituted, like racial groups, by a merely superficial difference from the norm.

This change, typified by the movement to establish same-sex marriage, was carried along in part, of course, by the ever more thorough saturation of our moral language by various forms of contractarianism, such that it is now unimaginable for many people that there could be moral prohibitions on actions undertaken by consenting adults. As mentioned, there is no such explicit moral framework that would allow for an analogous change for pedophiles, so I don’t think we’ll see a pedophile Stonewall anytime soon. But surely one of the reasons Western society punted on its traditional insistence that sodomy was immoral was its disbelief in erotic tragedy–that there could be people whose deepest desires were a terrible burden, through no fault of their own.

McArdle has a bit of a pre-modern streak, and so she can write sentences like this one:

In some sense, people like this–the pedophiles who never do anything, and do their damnedest to keep from even thinking about it–are exercising a virtue that borders on the saintly.

But it’s precisely this idea that our society found intolerable with regard to homosexuals, and still finds intolerable today. Moreover we have scarcely any idea of what a life spent exercising this virtue would look like. Where are the exemplars of this life? What kinds of social arrangements have we made for them? The lines of dialectical force are all criss-crossed when it comes to pedophiles. I have no idea where they might take us in the coming decades.

Reading both Andrew’s comments on the Atlantic’s site re-design and Ta-Nehisi Coates, I am reminded again of the importance of creating something personal with new media, that blogging is not journalism exactly, and that bloggers themselves are more rightly the “brand” in question than the publications they write for (though, in all honesty, there is and should be a mix – Coates and the Atlantic are in some sense a dual-brand, neither one the same without the other.  Same goes for all the Atlantic bloggers.)  As Andrew notes,

[A] blog is inherently a live process and conversation and anyone who actually understands blogging’s intimate relationship to its readership – and the critical importance of conversation to the endeavor – would never have dreamed of turning it into a series of headlines. That’s what worries me deeply. Not the inevitable transitional glitches but the philosophy behind it.

I think this cuts to the heart of the matter, and cuts directly to why so many people – myself included – really dislike the re-design at the Atlantic.  It’s not the aesthetic that I find so bothersome – and indeed, I don’t notice much of a change at all at Andrew’s digs – but the transformation of the other blogs into essentially archives, subsumed into the larger “channels” and thus stripped, to some degree, of their personalities.  Since the draw of these ‘voices’ has always been one of the Atlantic online’s strongest features, I find this disappointing to say the least – but like Andrew notes, it is the philosophy behind it that is most troubling.  This passage from Coates is worth reading also:

For my part, you have to understand that, to a large extent, whatever beautiful things have happened here, over the past two years, were, essentially, a fortunate mistake. What you’ve gotten is me hopping online and rather carelessly deciding to be myself, to talk to you, as much as possible, in the same way I talk to the people I know. And then basically curating the comments, banning people, deleting, and coaxing until there was a comments section that I, personally, loved reading.

It wasn’t market-tested. When I first got here, we didn’t even really have a web editor, and none of us expected this to grow into what became. We didn’t discuss whether it would be a good idea to have a post about Barry Sanders, next to a post about the Real Housewives of Atlanta, next to a series about the Civil War. We didn’t discuss commenting policy. We just kinda liked each other (me and my editors here) and decided to try something.

In short, none of this was intentional. It was all intuitive. And it’s fucked up, but it’s only as I’m writing this that I’m actually getting that that really is the point, and a big part of the draw. I kind of knew that, but it’s only in the absence of a coherent thing that I’m really seeing that.

This unintentional process is important.  There is something spontaneous and personal about blogging that is a serious if intangible change from traditional journalism. It is also, I think, the most important thing about a successful blogger – this ability for readers to connect and empathize with them. Similarly the community created around a blogger or a project is vitally important.  Jaybird has likened our own humble digs to a bar where we can all sit around and talk politics and culture and whatever over beers.  I have adopted this analogy in how I think about The League.  Indeed, I have come to think of The League as more than just a site, more than just a cadre of writers, but as a community unto itself, with all our commenters as part of the larger project.  The place would not be the same without the many commenters who liven up the threads – from Jaybird to Bob Cheeks to Michael Drew to North to greginak and so on and so forth – the list is too long to name you all. 

One of my great struggles writing elsewhere has been the lack of this relationship.  (New technical limitations have limited my own ability to respond to comments here in a timely fashion, but I do read each and every one.)  Indeed, though I am paid to write at True/Slant, I find myself devoting more time and energy to my writing here – and not just because it is a project that I helped start and continue to help shape, but because of this ongoing conversation we have gotten ourselves into – I can only frequent so many bars, I suppose, and this is my bar of choice.  (I know there is some crossover between commenters here and at True/Slant, but to be honest the comment system there is somewhat inhospitable.  And I dislike, perhaps, being just one of several hundred writers, whereas here I feel like I am part of a team, or at least a band of misfits…)  There is something organic about it that I enjoy.  I can anticipate who will be sitting where and drinking what, and who will storm out angry and who will chuckle at the antics and so forth.   And part of this is the site design, how we have worked to make the comments an integral part of this site, how we have kept the site fairly clean and ad-free, and so forth.  Perhaps it is also human nature to seek out communities (and bars) which we feel comfortable in. 

However, one of our original intentions with this site was to create a place where sustained, internal dialogue between writers, commenters, and guest-writers could be nurtured and grow into something rather unlike anything else on the interwebs.  I think, to some degree, in our push to increase traffic, to link to (and be linked by in return) Really Important Bloggers, we have let that part of our mission fall to the wayside.  I know others here have expressed a similar sense that this is the case.  Whether this has been an inevitable side-effect to creating a successful site, or to simply running out of things to talk to each other about is hard to say.  For my own part, I know that I focused a great deal on increasing traffic, on making the site as good as possible – and I admit to feeling a bit of a rush when I’d pick up a link from the Dish or get a good response from Larison or other bloggers who I had read and admired.

Either way, I wonder how the readers and commenters feel about this (not that the two groups, I hope, are mutually exclusive).  After just over a year, it’s incredible to see how far this blog has come.  We have gained and lost bloggers.  We are still (I hope, and believe) producing good, interesting, and relatively unique content.  We are still ad-free and entirely self-funded or funded by the generosity of the best damn commenters on the internet.  But have we lost some of that original vision?  Some of that original intent?  I would be interested to hear from both writers here and commenters on how, if at all, we could right the ship, reorient to bring back some of the conversational aspects of the original mission.  Make the site even better and more lasting.  We ditched the “series” function, but perhaps went too far in ditching the concept of series altogether.

In other words, this is a space to talk about blogging, this blog in particular, how it is doing things right and how it is doing things wrong, and so forth.  Thanks.

A set of hypotheticals for all the married folk out there. Each is intended to stand alone. They don’t escalate from one to the next, and I’m not fishing for any particular conclusions here.

1. The United States government, at both the state and federal levels, peacefully dissolves into anarchy. The functionaries all read David Friedman, agree with him, and close up shop. Are you still married? Or not?
2. Your church, if you have one, decides that your marriage was never valid, owing to a technical error in the ceremony, a mistake no one noticed at the time. Are you still married? Or not?
3. Your entire family, on both sides, and any children if you have them, all reach a consensus: You and your wife are all wrong for each other. They’re not going to recognize your marriage, no matter how happy you are, and regardless of how you conduct yourselves. Still married? Or not?

I’m genuinely curious how people will respond. How much of what makes a marriage is individual? And how much of it belongs to the community? How are the communal aspects of marriage allocated among state, church, and family?

The Oresteia is a monument to the advent of law and order over primitive cycles of vengeance. The three-play cycle (the only complete Greek trilogy we have) was first performed at the Dionysia festival in Athens in 458 BCE and won first prize. It was understandably a crowd pleaser, as it celebrates the recently established democratic institutions of Athens and the development of civilized order out of ferocious chthonic nature, represented here as the younger generation killing the older, but also as the formation of a patriarchal society and the divine sanctioning of an act of matricide. It remains a work of uncanny power and terrifying intensity.

Agamemnon

After the Trojan War, the victorious king Agamemnon returns home to Argos. He and his men have been through hell, but among the victory celebrations he is apprehensive about giving in to the thrill of victory, fearing hubris, that paramount Greek flaw. Aeschylus reminds us repeatedly that this war turned the world upside down and destroyed many lives simply to reclaim unfaithful Helen; there would be something inappropriate about crowing over an abattoir. In contrast to the Iliad, where Agamemnon’s pissing contest with Achilles nearly destroys the Greek army, here he is subdued and even timid, reluctant to enter his own palace with his loving wife Clytemnestra.

His humility is, no doubt, caused in part by the public knowledge that Agamemnon took the life of his own daughter Iphigenia. Caught in a storm that threatened to wreck the fleet, he took the advice of religious prophets and sacrificed his daughter to appease the gods. Facing an impossible choice, he picked poorly and now bears the guilt; Voltaire, memorably, saw Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia as a model example of the damage caused by religious superstition. [Read more →]

I think I’m going to start blogging weekly on the final season of Lost.  I wish I’d started this with the season premiere, but it’s too late for that.

As a primer – I become very disgruntled with the show around season 3.  It was a combination of burn-out (too much Lost in rapid succession) and the show’s own struggles which had me doubting whether I’d keep watching.  Suffice to say, I’m glad I did.  Season 4 was much better, and Season 5 was excellent.

So far, the final season looks to be shaping up to be just as good or even better than the last one.

So – some thoughts and spoilers on the season so far, and especially the latest episode, “Lighthouse”, after the leap…

A reader writes:

Erik, as someone who lives in the Mighty Whitey Elite NY-DC Corridor, but who comes from Tea Party America, and who has lots of friends and relatives highly sympathetic to the Tea Party movement, I want to say that I think you and Freddie are both right, though your point in defense of the Tea Partiers is a more difficult one for people who live in your (our) social and professional milieu to grasp.

Like Freddie, and I think also like you, I don’t have much time for the Tea Partiers. Their protests are incoherent. Whether they realize it or not, they are setting themselves up as tools of the Republican Party (I’m a registered Republican, by the way, though a deeply disaffected one). In conversations with these people, I am impressed, and not in a good way, by how totally unrealistic they are about the problems facing our country, and the possible solutions. They think Sarah Palin is untouchable, and when you actually try to talk to them about what she stands for, they can’t do it. "Palin good, anti-Palins bad!" is the response I get. They hate "Washington" (and who could blame them for that?), and they hate "big government," but as far as I can tell, their rage is inchoate — which is to say, ultimately pointless, though it can do a lot of damage before it plays itself out. As a conservative who thinks the GOP is pathetic and bereft of ideas, I find the Tea Party movement frightening, when it’s not silly. Strange that a movement can be both ridiculous and unnerving, but that’s how I see them. I think Freddie is right to point out that there’s a lot of bad, crazy stuff going on with those people. To me, the worst thing I’ve seen and heard from them is flat-out racist commentary about President Obama.

But when I read or hear people like Freddie portray these people as nothing more than whiny babies who have lost their "privilege" and who can’t deal with it, I instantly sympathize with them, for reasons you’ve articulated. Look, I know these people. I grew up with them. I am related to them. For all their flaws, I can say confidently that they are in most respects the backbone of this country. They live their own lives, work hard, treat people fairly, and expect to be treated fairly in return. They’re patriotic and proud of what they have, which is too often not a hell of a lot (you don’t see many upper middle class or wealthy people identifying with this movement). It’s easy for people like Freddie to hate on them, not only because some of them make it easy with bigoted statements, but also because they are The Other, and are pleased to identify themselves in opposition to people like Freddie. We are constantly admonished by the media to be understanding and accepting of "diversity" among the various peoples of America, but these white working class and middle class people are the only ones it’s okay to define only by their flaws. I’ve struggled with the same thing many educated Southerners of the post-civil rights generation have: how is it that people who can be so good, so deeply kind and selfless and brave, can be so completely blind and ugly on the question of race? That is, thank God, less of an issue today than it was 20 years ago; times change, and so do people. But the fact is, there are few people, or peoples, who are all good or all bad, and learning to see the people I come from in Tea Party America as fundamentally good despite their (often nasty) biases has been for me a moral education. If you were stranded on the side of the road in rural Alabama, your best friend is likely to be a redneck churchgoing Tea Partier who would come out in the middle of the night to rescue you, and either put you up for the evening or buy you a hotel room. It might not make sense, but I’ve seen this kind of thing happen a thousand times.

The tragedy of these people — hell, my people — is that they don’t grasp how the Republican Party and Fox News exploit them. Did they benefit from the depredations of Wall Street? Hell no! The Republicans and the Democrats both allowed that to happen. In my view, the Republicans have made an art of appeasing the Tea Party types (before they were called that), while really pushing hard for the interests of Wall Street. And the Democrats, despite their pretenses otherwise, consider these white people to be an embarrassment at best, but more often than not a menace. Who is really for them? Nobody, not really. No wonder they’re angry, and confused. I dearly wish they had real leadership, and weren’t taken in by that clown Glenn Beck, that cynic Dick Armey, and that nitwit Sarah Palin. Their grievances are real, and legitimate. But, as Freddie understands, they have chosen whom they’ve chosen, and however sympathetic I am to their plight, I cannot entirely blame people for scorning them for the way they have chosen to express those grievances.

It’s a real mess. In my state’s Republican primary this year, I’ll probably have to choose between a party hack or a Tea Party loon. I don’t know how I’ll vote, if I vote at all. Choices on the Democratic side seem as bad or worse. We’re in a bad fix in this country.

I agree with pretty much all of this.  I still think that the tea party members are more diverse than we give them credit for, and not all of them are as Utopian in their vision of a small-government America as the most vocal ones, but I still see no political home there, any more than in the GOP (let alone the Democrats). 

I’m just going to go start my own political non-movement.  Let’s call it Beat Conservatism.  We’ll all be bums and rail against the centralization of power, against war, against modernity and all that jazz.  We won’t be pissed off all the time, we’ll write poetry.  We won’t rally or make signs or go on TV or run candidates – we’ll just embrace our ineffectualness.  The great irony of true conservatism, if I may call it that, is that at its heart is a distrust of power.  So to really embrace it you must give it up, let go of power, let go of political ambition.  Become political pacifists.  Embrace the culture and not the war.  That’s what my non-movement will be about.  (P.S. if anyone has any literature or references on the end-days of Jack Kerouac I’d appreciate  hearing about it.  He was a life-long Republican, and toward the end of his life re-embraced Catholicism.  Quite a fascinating, but terribly sad man and story.)

Marc Thiessen has been trading punches with liberal bloggers over the factual accuracy of his new book, Courting Disaster. My guess is that he’ll be vindicated on the facts — after all, he was there. But this argument is just a sideshow, because Thiessen is wrong on the ethics, and that’s the debate that really matters.

As many people have pointed out, a single act of waterboarding does not necessarily amount to torture. But this misses the point. Waterboarding would be useful only if it was done in a way that amounted to torture. Here’s what Christopher Tollefsen (a professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina and co-author with Robert P. George of the book Embryo: A Defense of Human Life) has to say today about Thiessen’s argument:

In any event, the upshot of my discussion is this: if, as the double effect defense presupposes, waterboarding or some other interrogation technique is done in a way that is expected to cause harm to the suspect, then that harm is most likely intended as a means by the interrogator and double effect will not justify it. And if such techniques are performed with the intention to cause pain, but not either direct physical harm, or psychological disintegration, then they are likely to be ineffective. Either way, it is, in my view, a good thing that United States’ policy has moved (as it did in the second Bush term) beyond the grim, if understandable, policies of the first few years after 9/11.

This is not a strident statement, but it’s implications are clear and important: the United States must not resume waterboarding detainees and Marc Thiessen should stop justifying his claims by misapplying the Catholic moral tradition.

Mark Shea recently denounced Patrick Lee, another leading Catholic thinker, for “making the usual excuses for the Bush administration.” Maybe Lee has been insufficiently polemical, but I hope Shea will acknowledge the fact that Lee has written clearly that the Bush administration did engage in torture. From Lee’s 2006 article in the American Journal of Jurisprudence (Vol. 51, pg. 206. Not available online.):

Pain by itself does not seem effective in the military situations envisaged in the current debate  about what should and should note be allowed in the interrogation of suspected committed terrorists. This is why prolonged beating and prolonged deprivation of sleep, together with other methods (hooding, forcing the detainee to stand or sit for hours or days in contorted positions), plus other activities have been resorted to. In such actions, however, it seems that there is a complex set of actions designed to reduce the detainee to a “dis-integrated” state [Lee's definition of torture -MS].”

Even Lee, who has been denounced by one torture opponent, thinks that what Thiessen defends is torture. How much room does that leave for Thiessen? He wants us to listen to his expert voice on the facts of the Bush interrogation program. Fair enough. But that means he needs to listen to the experts on the ethics.

I see that it’s time for all serious people to talk about sanctions against Iran.

Are you tough? Or are you a wuss? Because — again with the duality of politics — those are your choices, and they are the only choices you get. If you’re tough, you’ll support sanctions. If you’re a wuss, you’ll wuss out.

I often am struck that this is how most people, both left and right, frame virtually every question of foreign policy. Now, they’ll usually add, sometimes it’s okay to be a wuss. Sometimes it’s prudent. Sometimes wusses do good things, even. But none of that changes the basic framing.

This, however, will. Sanctions work — on the margin. That is to say that sanctions affect different people, at different times, and in different ways, depending on the internal conditions of the target country. Some people in that country will suffer immediately. Others will never suffer at all. Some will even grow rich. The law that creates an economic sanction may be uniform, but its effects never are.

This is how all economic interventions work, foreign or domestic. Uniform action, disparate response.

Consider that those who have very little in a country — the poor, the marginalized, the uneducated, the sick, the very young or old — will have few resources that they can put toward subverting a sanctions regime. The wealthy, who can arrange the smuggling and pay the bribes, take a lot longer to be hit. They may even benefit — thanks to their ability to game the system, they now monopolize some scarce and valuable goods.

The more of a dictatorship a country is, the more the little people suffer, and the less the elites feel anything. We can’t really imagine that the very highest leadership of Iran is going to bear the weight of sanctions all by themselves, out of magnanimous concern for their long-suffering people. Far from it! They’ll make sure, with their command of the economy, that the poor, the marginalized, the uneducated, the sick, and all the rest suffer the most. It costs them nothing, and it sure looks good on TV.

Nor would a selfless dictator do any good for his people anyway. In a dictatorship, the ruling class is small by definition, so even if the rulers renounced all their luxuries, it’s not like it would meaningfully enrich the population. A hundred million dollars, divided by a hundred million people, is a dollar. Besides, the dictator and his cronies are the best-situated of all people in a country to appropriate everything, and to take advantage of a sanctions regime for their personal enrichment and pleasure (see: North Korea).

This is the real reason that sanctions against dictatorships rarely work. The decisionmakers absolutely never feel them. Squeeze a little, and you hurt the poor. Squeeze harder, and you hurt the middle class. Rarely, and with extraordinary pressure, you may hurt a few rich people here and there. But you can’t ever squeeze hard enough to hurt the political leadership. If you do, they just take it out on everyone else.

Note that the great success story of sanctions, the end of apartheid in South Africa, occurred in a democracy. Yes, it was a reprehensible and racist democracy, but it was still far more of a democracy than the pure sham we see in Iran. The important factor here is not whether we think the government in question is a Good One or a Bad One. Obviously South Africa was the latter. But in it, many of the people who were hurt by sanctions — the poor and middle-class whites — still got a meaningful say in politics. In Iran, there is no similar constituency. The last election appears clearly to have been stolen, the candidates’ lists are rigged anyway, and everyone knows it.

Now, maybe some of this is elementary to some people. I know that as a piece of analysis, it’s not at all original. But if what I’m saying is true, then why are sanctions so popular? Why aren’t they described for what they are? Imagine if every sanctions proposal were retitled: “Proposal to Hurt the Poor in _______, and to Enrich the Dictator and His Cronies”!

If we can’t retitle these proposals, why can’t we at least talk clearly about them? I have a answer there too, but it’s not one I like. It’s not one I even like to think about.

Patrick Deneen has written a fascinating entry on friendship, politics and civic virtue. Excerpting doesn’t do the post justice, but here’s the crux of his thesis:

The real relationships of people in their localities is to be replaced by rationalized and approved “programs” – “justice” is to replace “friendship. Much of the domestic politics of the 20th-century has been precisely motivated by this ambition, to displace local loyalties, and with them, attendant limitations upon those loyalties, with an abstract loyalty to nation (and, now, to the “international community”) in which concrete relations are replaced by fungible arrangements based in utility and justice is ensured by government mandate and policy. Justice – the inferior standard of mistrustful individuals – liberates us to pursue our interests without concern for the loyalties to places and communities; it is a wan echo of friendship, aimed above all toward the goal of individual liberation from the “bondage” of care, and further, a narrowed view toward the world and fellow creatures to one based mainly upon utility. Fellow citizens become more often viewed as competitors and even enemies than friends: as Aristotle predicted, where civic friendship wanes, lawsuits fill the emptied public space. Accordingly, our general mistrust for the public grows, and our relationship to law becomes one in which we see it as an imposition from outside – by “foreign” elites – rather than as emanating from the interaction of fellow citizens with a shared and discernible concern for commonweal. Our “liberation” from the bonds and limitations imposed by friendship in politics leads to the rise of the felt sense of political tyranny.  This analysis, of course, echoed Tocqueville’s understanding that the rise of “soft tyranny” came not from “Statism” as such, but the isolation and weakness experienced by modern democratic “individuals.”

I’m certainly sympathetic to this diagnosis, but I think it’s pretty easy to see why friendship isn’t a suitable basis for political administration beyond the local level. The central objection is scalability: what looks like harmless familiarity at a town meeting is more like cronyism on the national stage. In an intimate setting, the logic of appointing people you know and trust is pretty straightforward: disinterested, scientific expertise is harder to come by at the local level; close working relationships often produce successful results, and friends and neighbors are less likely to assume cronyism or bribery played a part in personnel decisions if they can vouch for the character of the appointee.

Without the benefits of familiarity, however, political friendship veers dangerously close to outright corruption. Detached from localities, politicians are no longer subject to close supervision from their constituents, who can prevent practices like appointing friends from lapsing into outright cronyism. I don’t think it’s any accident that Ted Stevens, Alaska’s legendarily corrupt former Senator, was also celebrated for his political loyalties:

Many of Stevens’s colleagues afford a grudging respect for him. In part that’s because, in spite of his outbursts, Stevens has a certain old-fashioned integrity: He keeps his word and is fiercely loyal to his friends. According to one Senate aide, Stevens was constantly by the side of his dear friend Democrat Daniel Inouye when the Hawaii senator’s wife died last year. (Inouye reciprocated last month by touring Alaska with Stevens in his hour of distress, telling the local press that coverage of his ethics woes is “overkill” and saying that, if it weren’t for Stevens’s earmarking, “Alaska would be in the Stone Age.”)

Having read the Porch for some time, I think I can anticipate Deneen’s response to this objection: Don’t get rid of friendship in politics, get rid of politics at the national level! Whether this is feasible or not is another question entirely. Deneen favorably mentions the Articles of Confederation earlier in his post, so why not consider the Republic’s dire condition before the Constitution was ratified? Congress couldn’t collect enough revenue to pay off its wartime debts, and if you read City Journal’s excellent article on John Jay, you’ll learn that the government’s inability to force state citizens to pay off prewar British creditors allowed England to maintain garrisons on American soil even after the Treaty of Paris was signed. To take a more recent example, I’m not sure how the civil rights movement would have fared without the benefit of a disinterested, muscular national government. Friendship and civic virtue may go hand-in-hand at the local level, but on the national stage, some pretense of objectivity is worth preserving.

I have learned far more about healthcare reform than I ever thought I would in recent months.  In the end, what leaps out at me is that this issue – unresolved – will become a more and more of a thorn in conservative’s side.  If people think the Tea Party phenomenon is bad, just wait until a real populist movement rises up that is fundamentally opposed to free trade, that wants more rather than less government, that demands protectionist policies and entitlements.  The one thing which I can see spurring on something like this more than any other issue is a combination of poor employment and poor (and expensive) healthcare.  Is it so hard to imagine the Tea Partier who wants government to keep its hands off his Medicare, to be turned into an advocate of protectionist policies?

The current reform bill is not nearly liberal enough to avoid such a movement, nor is it conservative enough to really put into place any real chance at a market solution.  It keeps the lousy system we have in place now, and adds to it a tremendous cost to the middle class.  Furthermore, I see no future political will to actually implement any true market solution for healthcare.  So Republicans should think about ways to make national healthcare more sustainable via market mechanisms (choice, HSA’s, etc.) while still accepting the fact that an overall national/social model will be adopted eventually.  Otherwise healthcare will likely persist as an issue and Republicans will be increasingly on the losing side of that issue.

I think the best model would probably be something like single payer plus health savings accounts.  Make people of whatever income responsible for basic healthcare costs, but protect them from really damaging bills.  Free up businesses and entrepreneurs from the chains of healthcare uncertainty.  Somehow find a way to increase the supply of healthcare; and work toward means by which we can make cheaper, alternative healthcare solutions more available.  Alternatively we could adopt something like Wyden-Bennett.  My reluctance to support this bill, pure ideological concerns aside, is that I worry it will only help persist the status quo, and the status quo is no good.

Whether there is a reasonable alternative is harder to say.  Federalism is quickly going out of style – and the next real national movement may be a unity of tea partiers and union members, social conservatives and progressives – the sort of movement Mark has predicted, but one that is bereft of libertarian and free trade principles.  What would that do to our trade policies?  To our employment rate and productivity?

Suffice to say, for anyone with a libertarian economic outlook, or for anyone with concerns over civil liberties, this should be a concern.  Perhaps fending it off with a reasonable compromise on healthcare reform would actually make a great deal of sense.

In the comments to my tea party post, Freddie writes:

It would help, you know, if you didn’t caricature my argument, or insert terms I didn’t use. Indeed, the point isn’t that they are redneck or that they are racist, but rather that they are, like all people who have found themselves leaving a position of political privilege, scared and angry. That you can’t take that as anything other than racism reveals again that you are a poor student of history, Erik, and you act out against those who  call you on it.

At some point, there’s just got to be an acknowledgment of this bare fact: all of these soi disant dissident conservatives, bohemian libertarians and reform Republicans– they are not like the Tea Partiers. And you know they aren’t. What’s the biggest tell? They don’t live where the Tea Partiers live. How many of the self-styled defenders of the Tea Party movement live where the Tea Partiers live? How many conservatives writing for <i>The Atlantic</i> or libertarians at Cato live in rural Texas or the Mississippi Delta? When do you think the last time was that your average boho DC blogger had a real Tea Partier over to their home? How often does your average pomo conservative or libertarian go out for beers with a genuine Tea Partier? What percentage of the real Tea Party protests, do you think, are from New York and DC?

Ah, you say, that just goes to show how close minded you are! But it doesn’t, though. It shows how close minded <i>they</i> are. Because they have explicitly and consistently defined themselves culturally. <i>You can ask them</i>. It’s all over their signs and literature. What did they say about Sarah Palin in the proto-Tea Party moment? They said, "She’s just like us. She’s one of us." She wasn’t– she was always rich, and now she’s downright <i>wealthy</i>–but she plays the game by hating the right people and defining herself <i>against</i> the right people. You really think that all that talk of the "real America" didn’t mean anything? You think that doesn’t have anything to do with how this country is changing? Or did you just ignore that like you ignore everything they say, so that you can foist more and more virtues onto them that they don’t possess and <i>don’t want</i>. What do they have to do to convince you that they are serious when they say that they don’t like who they don’t like? How many signs does it take? How many slogans?

That’s the bottom line here: there are an awful lot of fantasy going on. You throw on so many wonderful virtues to people who are not like you, because you are using them. They are a symbol for you, a political mass to be exploited. <i>They are telling you they are not like you</i>. I assure you, when they constantly attack the "college elite" or whatever is their preferred euphemism at the time, they are saying, among other things, "we don’t like people who write thought provoking blog posts on the Theogony."  What planet do you live on where that is not the case? Ask yourself, Erik, really ask yourself, what percentage of Tea Partiers would slur Andrew Sullivan and his husband in a heartbeat if they had a chance? 50%? 60%? You’ll rush to deny that there’s any element of homophobia in the Tea Parties, but I’ve <i>read their signs</i>. I’ve read their literature. I go to their websites. I don’t have the time for pleasant fantasy.

I don’t have the time, and I won’t permit myself, because the beginning of respect, the precondition for respect, is listening to people and extending to them the right to self-define. That’s the laurel I’ll give them that you won’t. I’ll actually extend to them the courtesy of listening to them, rather than inventing some idealized version of them for my own ends. And it’s because I listen to them that I don’t respect them. I don’t respect their incoherent political platform. I don’t respect their fear mongering. I don’t respect their conspiracy theorizing. I don’t respect the hundreds– hundreds– of flat out offensive signs and images that you and I have both seen at their rallies. Me, personally, I’d rather be disrespected for who I actually am and what I actually say than respected as a symbol or a fantasy.

What the Tea Partiers tell me, in so many ways, is that they are my enemy. And so they are.

I’m not sure that it makes sense to respond to each of these points.  So let me first say that most of what Freddie is writing here is a straw man.  I have never been a loud defender of the tea parties, nor have I foisted virtues upon the tea party movement which don’t exist. Indeed, if anything I have spent a good deal more time and ink criticizing the tea parties than I have spent defending them.  Freddie is right – this isn’t my movement, nor do I think I would much fit in at the rallies or with the folk out there proclaiming that they are in fact the “true conservatives” or supporting someone like J.D. Hayworth who says things such as “Like the liberals, John McCain opposes water-boarding terrorists like the Christmas bomber.”  I may very well register as a Republican for the first time ever just to vote for McCain in the primaries!

Just the other day, I wrote in response to Mark,

Reading through the issues up for a vote in the Contract From America, it’s hard to take most of them terribly seriously, and while Mark is right that they are tightly focused on fiscal and economic issues, it’s hard to ascertain any coherent economic or political philosophy from the list.  The only consistent thread is reflexive anti-taxation which is neither new or unique.  And while some of the ideas are good ones, it’s hard to take the entire batch seriously.  Sooner or later, as certain groups develop more mature policy prescriptions the larger movement will splinter.  Some elements will be absorbed into the Mt. Vernon establishment which will gain some new faces but little else.  The remaining elements will be outsiders, and perhaps even morph into a third party.  But that group will be more extreme, more ideologically “pure” and thus even less relevant than the mainstream elites.

I have previously written that the Tea Party movement is similar to a glorified revolutionary war reenactment.  I have written against the reflexive anti-tax sentiment of the Tea Parties.  And while, on occasion, I have mused with optimism that the tea parties represent a new beginning, a move toward a better sort of conservatism in the future, I am largely cynical that this is the case (except that perhaps the more extreme elements on the right will end up self-destructing and will be resurrected as something wholly different and better…)  I am not starry-eyed about my relationship to the tea parties.  I may as well be an ‘elite’ and a RINO and all those other slurs and slings and arrows and talking points.