Scott has a thoughtful follow-up to my anti-pettiness screed.  I want to point out, however, that far more than the problems with populism, I was writing about the problems with elites manipulating it for their own purposes – which, in a sense, is the problem with populism.  It is not so much that the huddled masses are wrong, or not to be trusted, or any of that.  It is that they are all busy people.  They have kids.  They work for a living.  They don’t have as much time, money, or education as the elites do.  They don’t have the connections or the wherewithal or the behind-the-scenes knowledge of the political system. They’re not as connected to government or the media.  This doesn’t make them foolish or ignorant or bad.  Quite the contrary. 

In many ways the people out there opposing the Iraq war or the tea-partiers out there opposing big government or any of these grassroots groups are good people, honorable people doing good and important work.  Scott is involved in some activist efforts up in Canada, and if people didn’t get involved at the grassroots level or with politics in general, we’d be in much worse shape than we are now.  I am not against this sort of popular politics.  Indeed, we have a Democratic Republic so that we can elect representatives to do our will, to some degree, and in order for them to really understand our will a little bit of populism is necessary and vital to the health of our democracy.

But it can be misused and abused by the very people who so often populist anger ought to be directed.  And right now I believe we’re seeing a Republican leadership that is disingenuously manipulating populist sentiment against the president and the Democrats.  (I would argue that Obama has done much the same thing by running a very populist campaign and then following it up with a very insider-oriented administration.  He’s simply more charming than his Republican rivals.)  They are stooping to petty rhetoric and exaggeration and sometimes outright lies to rile up the base against a president who they describe as “radical” and worse. 

Now, I have no problem with opposition.  I think the Republicans should oppose Obama in many ways.  They are well within their rights and indeed within their obligations to do so.  It’s the pettiness and the dishonesty of their methods which rub me the wrong way, and I believe they stoop to these methods in order to gain populist support.  And populists are vulnerable to these elite leaders because the elites have everything the populists don’t have – high podiums, connections, funding, and so forth.  It’s a dysfunctional relationship, and one played out time and again throughout history.

So when I see Newt Gingrich on the Daily Show calling Obama a radical because we read a terrorist his rights on American soil, I just cringe.  It sounds ludicrous to me, because it is ludicrous.  We’re not talking about reading some enemy combatant over in Iraq or Afghanistan their rights after we capture them.  We’re talking about a guy we caught in a plane landing in Detroit.  There is a difference.  And of course, there is precedent with the Shoe Bomber, just as there is precedent with trying terrorists in non-military courts as George W. Bush did over five hundred times during his presidency.  Gingrich and other ostensibly smart people should know better than to dress this up as some “radical” anti-American and dangerous practice. But they do it because they believe it stokes the fires of angry populist sentiment in America, and because they want to be in charge of the narrative however absurd and petty that narrative may become.

Has it always been thus?  I suppose it has, to one degree or another.  Nor are the dividing lines so easy to define.  Some elitism is just as necessary as some populism.  Indeed, we can’t really do away with any of it can we?  The point is, however, that we can do away with some of the pettiness, some of the dishonesty, and shoot for more reason and integrity.  We don’t have to be nice or amicable either.  We don’t have to ditch partisanship in favor of some mythical bipartisan Utopia.  We can be partisan and honest at the same time.  We can be partisan and still not so petty.

h/t to my boy Drew Raley for dropping this knowledge on me.

I’m a sucker for rhythmic minimalism:

Perhaps inappropriately, Mister Kain’s recent post about populist conservatism comes to mind because I’m reading Hesiod, who I’ve heard called a “conservative” more than a few times now. It’s a cringe-inducing term and terribly anachronistic; not only is Hesiod not a conservative politically, but he doesn’t really hope to “conserve” much of his society. He distrusts the polis. And yet there might be some similarities of thought between Hesiod’s worldview and a sort of organic conservatism, typical of small agrarian communities of the sort that are often spoken for by populists; but a worldview that has never translated very well into political movements.

Instead, I’d describe Hesiod as an old curmudgeon. He’s cynical, provincial, garrulous, grouchy, none too fond of women or lazy people, and actually not too fond of most people. It’s hard to read him without hearing the voice of Archie Bunker or your miserable grandfather. But, like your miserable grandfather, he also has some good advice, once you get past a bit of ugliness. [Read more →]

You might have noticed that I’m on a bit of a hiatus right now. Maybe not, either way is fine. I’ve left the League in the capable hands of my fellow contributors to focus more of my time and attention on various other projects, links for which will be forthcoming as early as Monday.

Today; however, is a bit slow, so I thought I’d drop a quick note in response to Erik’s post of yesterday on the pettiness of current conservative politics, the effort and sincerity of which I appreciated greatly.

In that post, Erik wrote,

Populism, after all, is just a nice word for “mob”. If ever there was a thing that conservatives were meant to protect us against it is the rule of the mob. Conservatives were never supposed to be the mob, were never meant to be its advocates.

In so writing, I think that Erik has succinctly summed up why he, despite twists and turns, ducks, bobs, and weaves, and, ultimately, come what may, is a conservative at heart while at the same time articulating a (if not “the”) pressing Conservative dilemma: Erik and most other conservatives don’t trust people.

I don’t say that to be derisive or condemning, it is a perfectly acceptable position to take given the vagaries of common modern life. But this strikes me as one of the fundamental planks of conservative ideology, when the chips are down, people are not to be trusted. And so we must find ways of protecting ourselves from those that cannot be trusted, namely: everyone — excepting maybe family and close friends, and even then…

I note this primarily because one of the projects in which I am currently engaged is an exercise and exploration into precisely the opposite perspective: given the opportunity, people will, more often than not, demonstrate not only that they are trustworthy, but that they are quite capable of not just meeting, but exceeding your expectations. There are no golden rules here, of course. People cannot 100% of the time either be trusted or not trusted. But I am coming around to the idea that people can be trusted often enough that I find myself increasingly averse to precisely the terms that Erik choose to employ: mob or, in other popular lexicon, the masses.

My projects aside, I think this fundamental lack of trust presents, as I mentioned, a real dilemma for conservatives. Conservatives are supposed to be the advocates of liberty and the watchdogs of tyranny, they rail against the excesses and intrusions of government in all it’s myriad forms. And yet, articulations like Erik’s often break down into beliefs like: keep the government out of my life, except when it comes to those people, if government is supposed to do anything it is to keep me safe from those people! And, of course, the number of ways in which the actions of those people, the mob, the masses, intrude on one’s life are never ending, so the number of ways in which government must be utilized as the means by which the untrustworthiness of those people is mitigated grows in a proportional fashion.

Such is the way that — and believe the legislative trajectory of conservatism bears this out — advocates of liberty and limited government wind up constantly finding new ways to use government as a means of guarding against the excesses and dangers of the mob and, presto change-o, government continues unfathomably to grow under their direction. Call it subtle governmentalism, conservatives claim to be thoroughly averse to government excess and speaking loudly and courageously against it in public, but in private enable a justifyng cognitive dissonance to grow it, time and time again.

At least liberals are upfront about their belief that government is a useful means of providing the needed measures for society, sometimes for the mob/masses and sometimes guarding against. Not so for conservatives who are locked into this sort mistrust-limited government finger trap that seems inevitably to render the majority of their rhetorical flourish empty when the rubber hits the road.

Again, I’m not condemning here, we all have our catch-22s with which to deal. But if this isn’t the major roadblock for conservatives and conservatism in contemporary political practice, it strikes me as a fairly significant one.

Every First Lady is obliged to tackle some trendy and media-inflated crisis.  For Hillary Clinton it was healthcare.  Laurah Bush focused on literacy.  Michelle Obama wants to end the dread childhood obesity “epidemic”.  Perhaps because the federal government has shown such skill in combating similar issues – such as our nation’s failing public schools – Mrs. Obama believes that it is the best institution to tackle our expanding waistlines.  That the federal government cannot tighten its own belt is beside the point.

Despite the fact that Mrs. Obama took personal responsibility for her own children’s near-miss with childhood obesity, the First Lady believes that the vast majority of Americans could use the beneficent hand of the state to drag their own children back from the brink.  To do this she proposes that the federal government does what it does best: spend lots and lots of money.  And to do that, President Obama has proposed that the government form a task force to see which spending project will sound the most appealing to voters. 

A few of the ideas floated include:

• Working with the the American Academy of Pediatrics to encourage its 60,000 members to check the severely out-dated Body Mass Index at each child’s visit, and give out “kid-friendly prescriptions” for healthy, active lifestyles.  Kids will fill this prescription by convincing their parents that “outside” is dangerous and that what the family really needs to stay healthy is a Wii.

• $400 million in tax credits drawn from the current budget surplus will go to grocery stores to form state-sponsored monopolies in “food deserts” – areas of the country where there is no easy access to grocery stores.  This is deemed much more efficient than scaling back zoning laws and allowing Wal*Mart to set up shop in said “food deserts” because Wal*Mart’s prices are simply much too low and of course because people who write these laws really don’t like shopping there.

• A new foundation will be created “made up of existing foundations and groups to monitor the campaign”.  Think of it as a super-foundation (or a super-healthy-foundation).  Perhaps we should form a second committee first, however, just in case the first committee isn’t quite up to the task.

• $10 billion over 10 years for the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, which would basically reward the most well-connected health food industry lobbyists around the country to provide healthy, free and reduced-priced school meals for kids.  Because again, allowing private companies to run school cafeterias would be far, far too efficient.

• Another $25 million would go to schools in the cleverest legislators’ districts to help renovate school kitchens and replace deep fryers with free range community gardens.

Now, you might be wondering how these steps will end childhood obesity in a mere twenty years as Mrs. Obama has ambitiously stated as her plan’s goal – a time frame which also conveniently sits outside her tenure as First Lady.  You might also wonder how healthier school food will trim down our children if they continue to eat bags of potato chips at home while lounging for hours in front of the television.  Perhaps the lady doth protest too much, given the shaky evidence that there is any such childhood obesity “epidemic” to begin with.

I’ve been trying to get at the heart of what bothers me so much about contemporary conservative politics & discourse these days. The closest I can come to an answer is that conservatives have fallen into the trap of modern politics – which is to say, they’ve become petty.  Extraordinarily petty. The endless lament over the liberal menace; the incessant ballyhoo over anything and everything the president does or says; the irksome victimhood – it all boils down to a propensity toward pettiness.  It becomes a cacophony of empty gestures and equally vapid posturing.  (The other side does this as well, of course, but you know what they say about two wrongs.)

The reason for all this pettiness?  I think it goes beyond merely scoring political points.  I think it has much more to do with cheap populism.  And nothing is more damaging or antithetical to conservatism than populism, even the rightwing variety.

Populism, after all, is just a nice word for “mob”.  If ever there was a thing that conservatives were meant to protect us against it is the rule of the mob.  Conservatives were never supposed to be the mob, were never meant to be its advocates. 

The first problem with the rule of the mob is the sort of leaders it produces.  Every mob needs a despot.  That’s why we have a Democratic Republic in the first place as opposed to a more free-wheeling Democracy.  Pure, unadulterated democracy is too close to mob rule, places too much political power into the hands of the majority. All too quickly such democracy leads to tyranny of one variety or another.

Populism can also turn a nation’s spiritual efforts into political efforts.  If one goal of conservatism is to preserve the spiritual buoyancy of a nation or a civilization, then conservatives should avoid the evangelist populism dominating so-called “social conservatism” at all costs.  Subverting faith or religious culture to the narrow and corrupting goals of politics can only backfire in unintended and perfidious ways.  Certainly the divisive culture-wars that this religious populist movement has used have only led to more of a spiritually muddled nation, and a population more resistant than ever to organized religion.  Political-evangelical Christianity is just as vulnerable as any other populist movement to the temptations of despotism, the need for charismatic and extremist leaders, and the shoring up of ever more power in order to achieve ever more ambitious goals.

In other words, populism is anything but limited, and political populism cannot lead to limited government.  That is the great problem with the tea party movement.  Liberty & order are precarious cousins, and populism is not the way to balance the one against the other.  Yet the modern conservative movement has abandoned the “politics of prudence” in favor of the politics of pettiness.  And it will be a while before reasonable people can right the ship.  Populism is the sword of revolution and radical change.  It is the predecessor of the guillotine and the gulags.  It is not conservative in any historical sense, whether or not it manifests itself in the right-wing.

Urbanophile has posted some thoughts on preserving buildings from the mid-20th century:

“Mid-century modern architecture is now in the same danger zone chronologically that late 19th-century buildings were in during the urban renewal period. These buildings are old enough to be considered dated, but not old enough to be considered ‘historic.’ The exact same was true of all those buildings that got torn down in the 60’s and are now are so lamented.”

Modernist buildings are not in the same danger now that 19th-century buildings were in 1950 because there is now an active preservationist movement in the United States, and while many preservationists may not care about modernist structures, the ones that do at least have the resources now to put up a fight when one is threatened. Nonetheless, the point is well taken. Many not-particularly-famous modernist buildings are minor masterpieces, such as this abandoned bus station in Baltimore, sufficiently obscure that I couldn’t find any photos of it online, but despite their aesthetic value the taste of the general public finds them banal at best. If a developer wanted to tear down that bus station and construct a highrise, it seems unlikely that protests would be general or vociferous. And this station is an example of Streamline Moderne, a relatively charismatic species of 20th-century architecture. Pity the Bauhaus-inflected fire station in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood (once again, no photos online), which probably reminds most passers-by of everything they hated about the 1970s.

And yet, even for those of us who find these buildings aesthetically thrilling, there is a real difference between modernist and late-19th-century structures that militates against preserving the former. Modernist styles, especially Modernism with a capital ‘M’ as incarnated in the International Style, are hostile to urban life. Modernist architects rejected the age-old practices that shaped 19th-century neighborhoods: they rejected the concept of the pedestrian-oriented streetfront, the idea of the vertical setback to let the sun shine onto the street, the idea of the small city block, the idea of non-standard floorplans, and the idea of the street as a public place. Where urban architecture prior to the mid-20th-century believed in the ideal of a city full of small shops and offices, citizens walking from place to place and occasionally encountering one another in the street, modernist design principles proposed instead a city of highways and rectilinear skyscrapers. This vision captured hearts and minds, as they say, and the rest is history. Daniel at Discovering Urbanism wrote a great post illustrating the contrast between the 19th- and 20th-century visions as it plays out in Albany. He posts photographs of the modernist Empire State Plaza and a historic street nearby:

There’s no doubt that the plaza is superior as a work of art. Among its many admirable qualities, perhaps the most skillful is how it rebuffs attempts to grasp its scale. The buildings on the right are not really all that tall (about twenty floors, it looks like, or 300 ft), but the strong vertical lines and the relative absence of lines telling you where the floors are, plus the vaguely geological extrusions, make the buildings appear as if they could be any size. They could be a mile tall and a mile away or they could be 300 ft tall and 300 ft away. The result is a kind of desituation, an ambiguity about physical location, which is of course part of the philosophical articulation of the International Style. But you’d never want to go looking in that plaza for a cafe to stumble into by chance.

Not all modernist structures are so miserably anti-urban (Mies van der Rohe’s complex of federal buildings in Chicago is a notable, if qualified exception), but as a rule they present hostile faces to the street and slow the reemergence of non-pathological street life in American cities. No one is threatening to tear down the Empire State Plaza, but if the wreckers came for the fire station in Cincinnati, despite my appreciation of its aesthetic merits, I can’t say that I would object.

Long before they were recorded, the Homeric legends were the material of traveling oral bards who composed as they chanted, making use of certain stock formulas: the battle, the speech, the ritual, proper descriptions for the goods, etc, and reciting stories that lasted hours, or even days. In a time of regional decline and stagnation, the epics recalled the greatness of the Mycenaean culture, while creating a common literature for the coming Archaic Greek revival; they stood, in a sense, between the palace and the polis. Eventually, two such epics were written down and attributed to the poet Homer, probably about 750 BC. I believe their worth is still easily recognized. The poet is adept at blending action-packed battle scenes with psychologically-penetrating drama. Characteristic are the imaginative metaphors drawing from nature/agriculture: i.e.

“As the south wind wraps a mist around the mountaintops- trouble for the shepherd but better than night for the thief, and a man can see no farther than he can throw a stone- so dense a cloud of dust arose from their marching feet as they advanced at speed across the plain.”

The “Homeric voice” actually reminds me of Stanley Kubrick: in both cases, there is emotional force and operatic intensity and action, but presented in a way that is all-seeing and dispassionate. Their characters speak for themselves, while the narration remains objective. There is the same creative range and all-encompassing quality; their works seem to be about everything. And with both men, one of their works seems equivalent to ten works by anyone else.

With both Kubrick and Homer, we remember a surfeit of great scenes. I have noted my love of the scene with Helen and the old men, one of the great images of feminine beauty in literature. Here are five more favorites: [Read more →]

Dani Rodrik on the Chinese trade imbalance vice grip:

So we are left, it seems, with two equally unappetizing options. China can maintain its currency practices, but at the risk of large global macroeconomic imbalances and a major political backlash in the US and elsewhere. Or it can let its currency appreciate, at the risk of inducing a growth slowdown and political and social unrest at home. It is not clear that advocates of this option have fully comprehended its potentially severe adverse consequences.

There is, of course, a third path, but it would require re-writing the WTO’s rules. If China were allowed a free hand with industrial policies, it could promote manufactures directly while allowing the renminbi to appreciate. This way the increased demand for its industrial output would come from domestic rather than foreign consumers.

It is not a pretty solution, but it is the only one. The great advantage of industrial policies is that they enable growth-promoting structural change without generating trade surpluses. They are the only way to reconcile China’s continued need for industrialization with the world economy’s requirement of lower current-account imbalances.

Rodrik is one of the few sane voices left on globalization.  His interest is (rightly) in the area of development: human, social, economic, and political.  Markets are a means to that end and not an end in themselves, something that’s described brilliantly in his book, One Economics, Many Recipes (highly recommended).

What he points to here with respect to the WTO and here criticizing the IMF for opposing a sane policy of (tempered) capital controls on “hot money” flows  (A policy I’ve long supported) is that countries along a developmental path have different needs which are best served by different policies.  Trans-national governing entities from fully modernized countries intent on replicating the rules and practices of those countries do not help emerging economies.  Instead, they’ve created the current damned if you do, damned if you don’t conundrum Rodrik brilliantly summarizes.

Lest I immediately hear howls about capital controls, it’s worth keeping in mind that in the wake of the financial crisis, we now have a system of capital bailouts.  The capital “control” lies with the banking and financial sectors and with the governments subservient to them.  See, for example, the positive response from the stock market after news surfaced of an impending bailout in Greece.

Absent capital controls, we have what Thomas Friedman called the electronic herd, which is by the way a perfect metaphor.  It’s just that Friedman saw no way to slow down or even impede/corral the herd and therefore argued we should just submit to its whims and welcome our new financial overlords (complete with breathless utopian talk of flattening worlds and all the rest).

Now that herd runs rampant through the field, eats all the local grass, leaves the land stripped, confident in the knowledge that it will get “bailed out” (whatever that means at this point).  In other words, the electronic herd has become a non-ecological herd, without a niche and competing/countervailing forces to keep it in check.  Those checks are what need to be restored.

On a practical level, Mark Thiessen’s case for capturing and torturing suspected terrorists in place of bombing them is pretty unpersuasive, mainly because he doesn’t have any proof that we lose a chance to interrogate Al Qaeda operatives every time they’re assassinated. Maybe Thiessen has some evidence to the contrary and the military really is sitting on a terrorist-capturing contingency plan, but absent an explanation of how we’d go about detaining terrorists in rural Yemen or Pakistan’s tribal provinces, I think it’s a safe bet that we use drone strikes because the alternatives are totally impractical. As I understand it, one of the benefits of drones is that they’re not as intrusive as a larger US military presence, which makes their use less offensive to the host country’s sensibilities than other military options (emphasis mine):

By early 2008, the Bush administration had tired of the Pakistani government’s unwillingness or inability to take out the militants in the FATA, and in July the president authorized Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults in the tribal regions without the prior permission of the Pakistani government. On September 3, 2008, a team of Navy SEALs based in Afghanistan crossed the Pakistani border into South Waziristan to attack a compound housing militants. Twenty of the occupants were killed, most of them women and children. The Pakistani press picked up on the attack, and the assault sparked vehement objections from Pakistani officials, who protested that it violated their national sovereignty. Army chief of staff Afshaq Parvez Kayani bluntly said that Pakistan’s “territorial integrity … will be defended at all costs,” suggesting that any future insertion of American soldiers into Pakistan would be met by force.

In the face of the intense Pakistani opposition to American boots on the ground, the Bush administration chose to rely on drones to target suspected militants.

Thiessen also suggests that the Obama Administration is deliberately avoiding efforts to capture terrorists because high-level interrogations would force “hard decisions” about what’s “needed to protect the United States.” By “hard decisions,” Thiessen is presumably referring to the use of torture, a cause he’s championed tirelessly in recent months. This is a clever insinuation, but it’s worth noting that the Obama Administration opposes torture not only on moral grounds, but also because it’s not particularly effective. If we take the Administration at its word that conventional interrogation techniques work better than torture, there’s no real political incentive for Obama to deliberately avoid capturing terrorists.

Despite his enthusiasm for mistreating prisoners, Thiessen does raise one important point. Namely, the moral contradiction between opposing torture and endorsing targeted airstrikes:

The president has claimed the moral high ground in eliminating the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, saying that he rejects the “the false choice between our security and our ideals.” Yet when Obama orders a Predator or Reaper strike, he is often signing the death warrant for the women and children who will be killed alongside the target — individuals whose only sin is that they are married to, or the children of, a terrorist. Is this not a choice between security and ideals? And why is it a morally superior choice? Is it really more in keeping with American ideals to kill a terrorist and the innocent people around him, when the United States might instead spare the innocent, capture the same terrorist alive, and get intelligence from him that could potentially save many other innocent lives as well?

My intuition is that airstrikes are appropriate if the military takes all reasonable precautions to avoid civilian casualties. My thoughts on this issue are pretty unformed, however, so I thought I’d throw these questions at the commentariat: Why does the status of terrorists change so dramatically after they’ve been captured? Is it because we can afford to treat enemies better once they’re detained and rendered harmless? Or does being held in captivity fundamentally change a detainee’s moral status?

I go back and forth on what I think about the propriety of the filibuster for legislative purposes, although I’m inclined towards the view that the filibuster is on the whole a good thing under those circumstances.

The announcement by Sen. Ben Nelson that he would not only oppose but filibuster Obama’s nominee for the National Labor Relations Board, however, provides an opportunity to discuss an area where I think the filibuster is not only inappropriate but also undermines the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the Constitution.

In circumstances such as executive and judicial nominations, the filibuster is to my mind utterly inappropriate and even outright toxic.  The power to nominate and appoint federal executive and judicial officers is Constitutionally vested in the President under Article II, although certain appointments are to be made with the “advice and consent” of the Senate.  [Read more →]