Collecting ballots in a plastic top hat at City High
Category Archives: Filthy Non-theoretical Politics
Poisoned Well of Blood Guilt by Association: A Very Special Full Disclosure
A frenzied Mark Ames at AlterNet attempts to discredit Megan McArdle’s writings on health-care reform by pointing out that her father has worked for the government and that she writes for the Atlantic! !!! It’s truly hysterical. Ames has done an immense service to critical thinking instructors the world over by piling so many argumentative fallacies into one neat package.
Well, maybe that’s the wrong attitude. After all, how can we really evaluate Ames’ argument before we know more about his parents and the circumstances of his childhood? And who am I to cast stones? I must admit that I too have parents. I suppose I ought to take this opportunity to expose my own hypocrisy before muckraking geniuses like Ames expose them first. So here we go. This isn’t going to be easy. Ahem!
So, my father had a long career as a police officer. There. It’s out. During my childhood, the taxpayers of Independence, Missouri and Marshalltown, Iowa put bread on our table and clothes on my back. Indeed, in Marshalltown (and, after I left home, in Council Bluffs, Iowa) my father was the chief of police. Nevertheless, I consider illegitimate many of the laws police officers are charged to enforce, and thus I believe police officers to be guilty of serious moral transgressions that differ from criminal assault, kidnapping, theft, etc., only in the sanction of the state and approval of the bulk of society. Yet, given the fact that policing paid for my piano lessons, any opinions I might have about police abuses of power, or about the state generally, pretty clearly refute themselves.
Perhaps worse, I learned to read and write in public schools, yet I use those very skills at a libertarian think tank (!!!) where I sometimes argue against the status quo system of public education. It is truly a wonder that I am able to sleep at night.
Actually… Doesn’t Megan suffer from insomnia? She does. So what more is there to say? Just this: greater government control over the health care system poses no threat to medical innovation or individual liberty. Anyone who would tell you otherwise probably has parents.
Why Can't My Team Do Whatever It Wants!?
Ezra Klein is annoyed with the Obama adminstration’s pusillanimous pussyfooting. Even that foul-mouthed hard-guy Rahm Emanuel is a squish these days. Why are the Democratic powers-that-be willing even to entertain the lame “trigger” public plan, which kicks in only if private plans fail to hit certain benchmarks for performance. Klein:
What Emanuel is saying here, however, is that in 2009, when Democrats control the White House, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate — and have larger margins than Republicans ever did in the latter two — that they are interested in settling on the same policy compromise [behind Medicare Part D, a product of a Republican president and Congress]: a weak public plan that would be activated if certain conditions aren’t met by private industry. That’s a bit weird. Weren’t elections supposed to have consequences?
Policy follows public opinion, more or less. And the public hasn’t really changed much since 2003. This is something partisans have to learn and relearn again and again. If a policy was unpopular before a change in the party controlling government, it will probably remain unpopular after. And politicians like getting reelected. It’s pretty simply, really.
Bush couldn’t reform Social Security because his plan was unpopular. Obama won’t be able to deliver a health-care bill ideological Democrats want, because what they want is unpopular and legislators know it. So Congressional Democrats want something they can cast as “victory” while doing nothing that could hurt their noble struggle for ongoing political self-preservation. Right now, strongly ideological media liberals like Klein have to decide whether they’re going to (a) act as enforcers, sending the signal to the powers-that-be that they will vocally and publicly count a “trigger” plan as a pathetic failure, or (b) sigh and prepare to declare whatever legislation passes a profound victory for ordinary Americans that shows just how great Democrats are.
But I imagine this one’s a tough call. For lots of ideological Democrats, the point of preserving political capital is to secure real universal health care. So I expect to see a fair amount of (potentially counterproductive) enforcer rhetoric.
Further Meditations on the Objective Meaning of Green Twitter Avatars
Some people were really ticked off by my Twitter avatar post, and I can see why. I guess it’s bad enough to accuse people of empty moral posturing. It’s another thing to accuse people of empty moral posturing that helps the people who worked like crazy to start an unjustified war in Iraq. So let me say that I completely understand the impulse to express solidarity with Iranians who seek freedom. I feel it very strongly myself, but I also don’t trust it. Why not?
Because I realize that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t understand Iranian politics very deeply. I will now proceed to make some mistakes that prove this. For example, I did not know until this episode that Mousavi was Prime Minister of Iran for many years under Khomeni, which pretty much guarantees he’s no angel. I did not understand anything about the internal divisions within the Council of Guardians and the Assembly of Experts. Indeed, I still don’t completely grasp how these various bodies are related to each other. What I gather is that that Khameni and Ahmadinejad are aligned against former Prime Minister Mousavi and former President Rafsanjani (who is now the head of the Assemby of Experts, the body that chooses the Supreme Leader. Thank you Wikipedia). I don’t really grasp whether Mousavi and Rafsanjani are in it together, or are in a “the enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine” sort of thing, or what. As far as I can tell, the ruling axis got worried A’jad might lose the election, botched the vote-rigging, but validated the result anyway. I don’t know who would have won had the vote been counted (I think this remains quite unclear), but in any case, it seems clear enough that Ahmadinejad is staying in power despite a pretty transparent flouting of the rules of an already deeply anti-democratic constitution. This provided a great opportunity for the anti-Khameni/Ahmadinejad faction to encourage a popular uprising, which I am sure is fueled by real discontent with the current regime. And much of this discontent I am sure is surely rooted in an authentic desire for a more liberal and democratic Iran.
Is that what we get if the Mousavi-Rafsanjani axis comes to power? A more liberal and democratic Iran? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think many people do. I do know that these guys are deeply embedded in the larger status quo power structure, have had power before, and their records don’t look so good. They may well represent improvement, but I don’t honestly know that. As far as I know, the outpouring of desire for change that we see so clearly on YouTube is being exploited by one faction of the Iranian ruling class to depose another. I’d like to see the whole theocratic structure of Iran fall. I’d like to see the whole country radically liberalize, but I think that’s unlikely, largely because I doubt very much that that’s what most Iranians want. I want Iran to be free, and I want Iranians to want to be free. And I’m quite willing to cheer for freedom. Go freedom! But given my ignorance of exactly what and who I’d really be cheering on should I alter my Twitter avatar to reflect the campaign color of the former PM of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I think the intellectually and morally responsible course of action is to watch with colorless hope.
I am, however, quite confident that the powerful faction within American politics that argued for and got a war in Iraq has been arguing for a much harder line against Iran in order to set up a familiar dynamic of sanctions, UN Security Council demands, and so on. Just read the Weekly Standard blog. Dick Cheney’s authorized biographer Stephen Hayes is certainly not trying to avoid a future conflict when he writes:
The reason to talk about consequences [i.e., what the U.S. will do if this or that happens in Iran] is, at least in part, because it offers an opportunity to influence how this is going to play out. It may be the case that there are few potential consequences from the international community that could affect regime behavior. But if that’s the case — and given the regime’s support for terror, its pursuit of a nuclear weapon, its theft of the election, and its violent suppression of the protests — doesn’t that make it more urgent for the international community to at least try to affect behavior and at least raise the possibility that there will come a time when the world refuses to recognize the current regime?
People are accusing other people of naïveté all over the place, so I’ll try not to. But let me say I think it is rather unwise to underestimate the strategic savvy of the opinonmakers at the Weekly Standard and Fox News. It is not “paranoid” to think they are in fact talented at shaping American popular opinion and then bringing it to bear to achieve their political aims. The correct description of the events in Iran continues to elude me. Perhaps I have been ideologically blinded to the obvious. All I can say is that given what little I know, it is not obvious. But it is quite clear to me that the story of a people yearning for freedom and rising up to demand their rights as citizens who are then crushed by an evil authoritarian regime that will do anything to achieve its evil ends… it’s clear to me that this story is useful to a certain faction in the ongoing debates about U.S. policy toward Iran. It may be that this story is the true story. But I don’t honestly know that it is, so I think it is prudent not to assume it is–especially given the fact that this narrative does play into the hands of the most dangerous people in American public life.
Things really are lining up rather nicely for the neocons, and I don’t think it’s crazy to be wary of helping them, especially when doing nothing but explaining why you’re doing nothing really can’t hurt. If Mousavi turns out to be the Iranian Gorbechev, I’ll be delighted. But then we’ll hear how the reverse domino theory has been vindicated, how George W. Bush is a world-historical champion of freedom, and how we should not in the future be so hesitant to knock down dominoes. If the protests are crushed, it proves how rotten and dangerous the regime is, making it all the more urgent that the “international community” intervene to make sure the evil mullahs don’t nuke Israel. If it turns out the new boss is same as the old boss, we’ll hear a lot about Iran’s instability, and the danger of nukes in that kind a tinderbox. Etc. So, yes. I am on my guard.
Anyway, I really did disparage people’s motives in my first post, and I don’t really think all Livestrong bracelets, pink ribbons, yellow ribbons, purple ribbons, blue ribbons, and green Twitter avatars are cheap, empty signaling. If you’re really sincerely just excited to do some small thing to stand with people risking life and limb for their freedom, I apologize. But I do ask you to reflect on what you do and don’t really know, and to consider what narrative benefits whom.
Meanwhile, IOZ interviews The Revolution.
Signaling and Solidarity
So folks on Twitter have been turning their avatars (little profile photos) green to show solidarity with the protesters in Iran. There are websites to help you do this. But why do this? How does it help? I want the Iranian people to live in freedom, just as I want all people to live in freedom. But the point of the gesture eludes me, unless the point of the gesture is to be seen making the gesture by others who will credit you for it. Like so many political gestures, it is vanity dressed up as elevated moral consciousness. It doesn’t help. Is it harmless? Unlike the stupidly grandstanding House resolution, the ruling regime probably won’t be pointing to verdant Twitter avatars as evidence that the uprising is an American plot. So I wouldn’t worry about that. Here’s what I do worry about. When people feel pressure to signal, and it’s free, they’ll signal. But sending the signal creates a small emotional investment in the overt message of the signal — solidarity with opponents of the ruling Iranian regime. As every salesman knows, getting someone to make a big, costly commitment is best achieved by getting them to first make a tiny, costless commitment. The tiny, costless commitment of turning Twitter avatars green is thin edge of the persuasive edge for the neocons who would like to sell the public a war in Iran. Since I would rather not be Bill Kristol’s useful idiot, I will conspicuously leave my avatar as is, and continue hoping for the best.
Cash for Clunkers
OK. Let me get this straight. I can get $4500 toward a new car as long as my old car gets terrible gas mileage. Well, I’ve got a 1996 Civic, which gets 30-something MPG. But it’s worth less than $4500. So I guess I should sell it for what it’s worth ($2-3000) maybe, buy a total piece of shit for as cheap as possible, and then exchange that for $4500 off a new car? I’d be several grand ahead. Of course, most of the models of new car I’ve got my eye on get worse mileage than a 1996 Civic. So if this plan induced me to buy a new car when I wasn’t going to, which it might, and I get the kind of car I think want, taxpayers will have paid me $4500 to drive a nicer but less fuel efficient car than I’ve got. Thanks democracy!
Or maybe I should just buy a clunker, get the trade-in, then instantly sell the brand new car for $2000 off sticker and pocket the rest. Anyway, better move quick. Lemons go fast when everybody’s thirsty for lemonade.
Free Government Money!
Matthew Lesko, an odd D.C. fixture, on the bailouts:
The Party of Nixon
Read Fabio Rojas’ illuminating post on the centrality of Nixonite networks and their priorities within the GOP for well over a half-century. Highlights:
[T]he narrative about Goldwater as the guiding light of the post-war GOP is wrong. Nixon, and his allies, have driven the agenda since the late 1940s. Other Republicans (Eisenhower, Goldwater, Regan) represented factions who, at most, were allowed a seat at the table created by Nixon.
[...]
The Nixon network (him and former staffers/appointees) have been in control of the presidency or vice presidency every time the GOP has won the national election. Furthermore, this network has controlled key national security positions very often in GOP administrations.
[...]
[T]he consistent theme, going back to the late 40s, is that the Nixon wing has been, almost without major exception, in favor of international interventionism. The GOP seems to have approved of nearly every American projection of power overseas, no matter which party is behind it. It’s fairly rare for policy makers in this orbit to call for pull backs in military interventions or to admit that any significant projection of force was a mistake. This view, of course, requires continual expansion of the executive branch’s power.
[...]
[C]onservative politics was not “reborn” after the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and cemented by Reagan. Instead, the Nixonites allowed this new ideological trend to be the face of the party, but they retained control over the institutional functions of the party, as evidenced by Nixon’s resurgence. This observation explains a lot of other puzzling feature of Republican politics. This is not the party of small government, it’s the party of national security. The party of individual liberty and self-reliance is actually the party of “enhanced interrogation.” The idea tying it together is national security, with superficial appeals to whatever helps win the election.
This sounds about right to me. The free marketeers and the culture warriors are useful idiots thrown a bone from time to time to keep the Nixonite establishment entrenched. Moreover, I’d say the U.S. national security apparatus remains shot through with the Cold War Nixonite ethos of Hard-Headed Big Boys Who Keep the World Safe. If the will of the herd and their elected windbags are behind with the program, great. If not, too bad. Even (especially?) Democratic executives are flattered by all the secret briefings, etc. and the gravity of Hard-Headed Big-Boy World-Saving responsibilities into sticking with the program. You can fight the permanent national security apparatus and get nothing in return other than a reputation as a giant pussy existential threat to America who is going destroy us all, or you can let the apparatus publicly act like you’re in charge of it while it more or less runs itself, allowing you to focus on the trivial issues you care about, like nationalizing things and raising taxes. Cheney wiping the floor with Obama over torture is a sad sign that it’s all still just churning along. The message, I take it, is that the damn hippy kids can appoint bisexual robot Latinas to the Supreme Court and tell GM to make cars that run on fairy kisses as long as they know the Serious People will continue to control the power that matters. All signs point to Obama going along, which, as Nixon knew, is what you can expect from self-impressed Ivy League assholes.
A bit of a digression there. Anyway, read Fabio’s post. Nixonites delenda est!
The Sotomayor Reflex
God, I hate politics. It really does make people stupid, especially those whose tribe is out of power. When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated, I knew nothing relevant about her judicial philosophy or, much more importantly, about her actual record as a judge. You’d think you’d wait to learn something about this before saying something about her, but no. People just proceeded to go crazy on cue.
Like Damon Root, I’m in favor of libertarian judicial activism. But I know that Barack Obama is no libertarian, and I knew he wasn’t going to nominate Kozinski or Posner. Too bad! So I was hoping for a relatively centrist liberal who sees some merit in libertarian arguments, especially about the protection of economic rights. As far as I can tell, there is nothing especially worrying about Sotomayor. She’s obviously super-qualified. And from what I’ve read, she seems like a highly competent, fairly moderate liberal who sticks pretty close to the law (which nobody really likes when they don’t like the law!) and is perfectly willing to side with Republican-appointed judges when that seems to her the right thing to do. What are people going batshit crazy over? I don’t get it. And I really don’t get why many Republicans have taken this opportunity to reinforce the already widespread impression that they are morally odious morons. God, I hate politics.
Ryan Avent's Innovations in the Game Theory of International Relations?
In response to my point below about the transparently inconsistent reasoning about public goods employed by many defenders of the woeful cap and trade bill, Ryan Avent writes:
This seems almost deliberately dense. In particular, it makes no distinction between the world of billions of daily, anonymous transactions and the world in which a handful of great powers attempt to hammer out a diplomatic agreement. Unsurprisingly, it’s very difficult to get millions of urban denizens to voluntarily come together to build and fund a road network or transit system in the absence of a coercive mechanism. The benefits are too broadly shared, and the incentive to free ride too great. But the smaller the number of players, the more concentrated the benefits, and the easier it is to find a mutually beneficial agreement.
I certainly wasn’t being deliberately dense. Ryan is, as always, quite charitable in allowing that my denseness might have been involuntary. I am grateful. Perhaps it is this very denseness that prevents me from grasping how I was being dense. I persist in thinking that the standard mode of reasoning about collective action problems applies. So I patiently await instruction.
Ryan evidently believes it is almost obvious that the structure of the strategic problem in securing global climate policy coordination is less complex than the problem of putting together standard-issue public goods, like a system of roads. In the case of global climate policy coordination, we’re talking not about diffuse millions but a mere “handful of great powers,” who will enjoy such concentrated benefits from an agreement that the normal worries about credible commitment, assurance, free-riding, and so forth do not really apply. So the absence of a coercive enforcement mechanism is pretty much irrelevant. Not only shouldn’t we worry about the standard logic of interdependent strategic action, but it’s almost deliberately dense to do so. My bad.
If only we’d known that global coordination problems among “a handful of great powers” was such a breeze, we’d have arrived at Kant’s global federation of perpetual peace centuries ago. Come to think of it, why were there two massive World Wars and a Cold War last century? It’s almost as if the great powers were being deliberately dense. But I guess we now know the trick of aligning the perceived interests of great powers: just make some kind of effort to cooperate. Go ahead and move unconditionally, even if your own country’s move actually signals quite clearly that there is next to zero political will to bear the costs of an agreement with teeth. And then what you do is you wait for other great powers to be impressed and encouraged and convinced by the immense advantages that will accrue to them once they jump on board. It’s easy once you know how.
Or maybe that’s not how Ryan thinks it goes. But then how does it go? I still don’t get it.
Other things I don’t get:
(a) The idea that “great powers” are headed by some kind of unified intelligence or agency that can make agreements and just stick with them. I thought the governments of states–even authoritarian ones–were semi-stable coalitions of various and often conflicting interests subject to the vagaries of mass public opinion.
(b) The idea that the benefits of global climate policy coordination — which will not be realized for many decades — will accrue to the relevant state decisionmakers and so provide them with sufficient incentive to make and stick to an agreement, but that the costs of coordination — which will be significant and immediate — will somehow not be borne by those decisionmakers (e.g., “the people” will not complain about these costs in a politically threatening way) and so will not overwhelm the posthumous payoff in the political accounting.
(c) The triviality of time inconsistency problems. I had thought that time inconsistency problems–that the government now cannot really bind the government later–were endemic to politics. This makes it almost impossible for a current government to credibly promise that a policy will persist over time. I had thought you needed some kind of mechanism (which we do not appear to have) to align the incentives of the parade of future decisionmakers to sticking with it over time.
(d) The option value of empty gestures. The Waxman-Markey bill appears to everyone–even advocates like Ryan–to be mostly a bust, if not a complete bust. It remains unclear to me why a transparently bad bill does more to improve the U.S.’s bargaining position than no bill.
I don’t see that Ryan addresses any of this as he goes on:
[T]here are fewer than ten relevant players, and only two really relevant players not already committed to reductions — the US and China. Given that climate negotiations are part of a repeated game between the two great powers (that is, they’re more or less constantly talking about one economic or political issue or another), it seems very likely indeed that an American pre-commitment to emission reductions would facilitate a similar Chinese commitment.
India? Cheap talk?
The repeated game between the U.S. and China looks to me trickier than this. First, it’s better for China in the short and medium term if we tax carbon emissions and they don’t. They sure will be happy to see us go first. (It will, among other things such as encouraging capital flight to China, give them more slack with which to clean up things like SO2 that really do matter to them in the short term.) So then what do we do if they don’t play along? Impose carbon tariffs? Then we have probably just started a trade war with our chief source of inexpensive manufactured goods. Is this the repeated game Ryan has in mind?
Ryan sums up:
Will Wilkinson works for Cato, and Jim Manzi writes for National Review, two great outposts of climate change denialism and do-nothingism. It occurs to me that if more of their compatriots were willing to discuss the issue responsibly, then upwards of 90% of the GOP might not be committed to a policy based on utter stupidity, and a better bill might be feasible. Instead, they’re busily arguing against Waxman-Markey. That’s their right, but it certainly says quite a bit about their priorities.
I wonder if Ryan would like to be more explicit about what he thinks my priorities are. I’ll tell you what I think my priority is: to make people, especially poor people, better off. I am against this bill because I honestly believe it will leave many people worse off and make almost no one other than politically-connected domestic interest groups better off. I think Ryan has a different assessment of its likely effects, but I don’t see any need to slyly impugn his motives. If he thinks his argument is so winning, then it might benefit him to drop this kind of well-poisoning rhetoric, which is beneath him, and start actually winning the argument.