Egregious Moderation

Julian Sanchez: Rogering the Constitution

Notes from the Lounge: Rogering the Constitution: I can already hear the talking point: "Even the libertarian Cato Institute thinks the president needs to be able to tap your phone without a warrant..." That will doubtless be the upshot of this phenomenally disappointing Wall Street Journal op-ed by Roger Pilon on the ongoing debate over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I'm not sure whether it makes matters better or worse that, when Cato's legal VP takes the wrong side on the major civil liberties controversy of the day, he does it with an array of pretty poor arguments. We begin:

Today the Senate takes up a bipartisan surveillance authorization measure that's already passed the Intelligence Committee. The clock is ticking. This Friday a temporary law called the Protect America Act will expire. If Congress does not act before then, the president's statutory power to prevent terrorist attacks will be seriously compromised.

The rest of the piece at least stakes out a principled legal view; this is just water-carrying for Republicans. The clock is "ticking" because the White House and its proxies in the Senate sought at every turn to block temporary extensions of the PAA so that a proper debate of a significant reform to foreign intel law could be conducted. (Fortunately, it does look as though we'll get that extension.) If the Senate actually wanted to get a bill out quickly, they could have gone with legislation that more closely matched the far saner RESTORE Act, which the House has already approved.

This dangerous situation should never have arisen. From the beginning, presidents have exercised their Article II executive power to gather foreign intelligence -- in war and peace alike, without congressional or judicial intrusion. As our principal agent in foreign affairs, the president is constitutionally bound to protect the nation. For that, intelligence is essential.

Intelligence is essential on the domestic side as well, where law enforcement is the president's main function. Yet not until 1967 did the Supreme Court require warrants for electronic surveillance. Congress codified that a year later. But both the court and Congress expressly exempted foreign-intelligence gathering from the warrant requirement.

First, as a general point, it bears noting that Roger's approach to interpreting the scope of executive national security powers is precisely the opposite of the approach he takes to the rest of the Constitution. When he reads "commerce" in Article I, Section 8, man that means commerce—not manufacture, not consumption, not activity that affects commerce—nothing but the literal buying and selling of goods. At the blurry edges, at any point where the scope of the power is ambiguous, he wants a narrow reading and a constrained power. The volume of intrastate wheat production and consumption may in part determine the price of wheat on the national market, but it's not interstate commerce, so on Roger's view, Congress can't touch it. On the other hand, because "intelligence is essential" to national security, "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" naturally entails the power to authorize surveillance of Americans' communications with (at least) persons abroad, subject to neither limitation nor, indeed, even scrutiny by the other branches. Second, the historical reading we get here is a bit tendentious. I'm not sure what is meant to be the point of observing that "only" in 1967 did the court finally recognize the absurdity, given new technology, of restricting the constitutional meaning of "search" to physical incursion on property. The contrast with presidential practice "from the beginning" seems calculated to suggest that any application of the Fourth Amendment on the wire is somehow suspect.

But since Roger is invoking Katz v. United States, let's have a look at that express exemption for intel gathering. It consists, essentially, of a footnote reading:

Whether safeguards other than prior authorization by a magistrate would satisfy the Fourth Amendment in a situation involving the national security is a question not presented by this case.

This is an exemption only in the narrowest sense, in that it recognizes the unique problems presented by national security surveillance, and so declines to pass judgment on such surveillance either way within the rubric of a case concerning ordinary criminal wiretaps. Notice, though, that the footnote contemplates "safeguards other than prior authorization by a magistrate". The inclusion of that word "prior" suggests an assumption that some kind of judicial scrutiny, even if after the fact, is appropriate. Whatever the nature of those possible safeguards, though, one imagines they were meant to consist of something a bit more robust than a presidential promise to behave.

Unfortunately, the exception was not to last. Following the Vietnam War, Congress increasingly inserted itself into foreign affairs, as with the 1973 War Powers Act. With the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed in 1978, Congress began micromanaging foreign intelligence gathering. That produced the "wall" between foreign and domestic intelligence gathering -- with foreign-intelligence agents focused on security, and domestic agents on prosecution and hence on obtaining "admissible" evidence. Neither side talked to the other. Many believe the resulting communications failures played a role in 9/11.

Conspicuously absent from this miniature history of congressional interference: any mention of the massive abuse of surveillance power uncovered by the Church Committee, which is what actually prompted FISA's passage. ("And I would've gotten away with it, too... if it weren't for that meddling Congress!") Apparently legislators were just in a Gladys Kravitz sort of mood. Recall that the "micromanagement" here consisted of establishing a process for court oversight of wiretaps on domestic parties, oversight so burdensome that until 2003, the FISA court had never rejected an application. (It has since come out that many of those rubber-stamped applications were falsified.) As for "the wall," the most dramatic claims about how the foreign/domestic division stymied investigation of the 9/11 terrorists have been debunked, and in any event, most of the bricks in that "wall" were executive orders, administrative rules, and intel community norms, not statutes.

In the aftermath of 9/11, believing FISA to be hopelessly inadequate, President Bush instituted his terrorist surveillance program (TSP) -- but not before advising key members of Congress. Nevertheless, a firestorm ensued when the New York Times made the program public in December 2005. The controversy continued until January 2007, when the White House announced that henceforth it would gather intelligence under FISA's antiquated restrictions.

How kind of the president to "advise" some "key" legislators of his decision to simply ignore the law specifying the "exclusive means" by which foreign intel surveillance of U.S. persons may be conducted. On Roger's theory, of course, there can be no conclusion but that this law is unconstitutional from start to finish, so this was pure charity.

Cooler heads in Congress grew concerned after Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell testified in July that "we're actually missing a significant portion of [the intelligence] we should be getting." That led to last August's six-month fix, which expires this week.

Yes, Mike McConnell's fearmongering represents "cooler heads" prevailing. I defy anyone to look at the process that led to the passage of the Protect America Act and find anything "cool" about it. In fact, Congress took McConnell largely at his word when the DNI asserted, quite implausibly, that the FISA court had somehow manufactured a blanket warrant requirement for foreign-to-foreign communications passing through U.S. switches. Nobody who actually understands FISA finds this remotely plausible. Since the court has declined to release the ruling in question, we can't know what it actually says. But it bears note that the administration did not bother to appeal the ruling, or to modify their program in any way to pass muster. They preferred to use it as leverage to terrify Congress into expanding their powers.

Obviously, this is no way to conduct the serious business of foreign intelligence. The ever-changing rules -- criminalizing transgressions -- leave officials playing it safe in a world of risks.

Wait, I keep forgetting: Are the rules "antiquated" because they're part of a framework established way back in 1978, or are they "ever changing"?

The Senate bill would be an improvement, not least because it provides retroactive liability protection for telecom companies that allegedly assisted the government after 9/11. But the deeper problem is the very idea of congressional micromanagement.

The Senate bill would require showing probable cause before targeting even U.S. persons abroad, dramatically increasing the role of the FISA court. As Judge Richard Posner wrote on this page two years ago, FISA may be valuable for monitoring communications of known terrorists, "but it is hopeless as a framework for detecting terrorists. It requires that surveillance be conducted pursuant to warrants based on probable cause to believe that the target of surveillance is a terrorist, when the desperate need is to find out who is a terrorist."

Troubling indeed. But not—what's the word?—oh yes: true. Post–PATRIOT Act, the terrible micromanagerial burden imposed by FISA is that the government must make some showing that foreign intel gathering is a "significant purpose" of an investigation. They do not need to show that the target is a terrorist, or knows any terrorists, or even sports a vaguely terrorist-ish beard.

The technical impediments to legislating are even greater. We're long past alligator clips on copper wires. Today, electronic communication is broken into discrete packets that travel along independent routes before being reassembled. As K.A. Taipale, executive director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy, has written, "even targeting a specific message from a known sender requires intercepting (i.e., scanning and filtering) the entire communication flow." Yet the Senate bill requires that intelligence analysts count the people in the U.S. whose communications were "reviewed," an all but impossible distraction for analysts already stretched.

This part is just flat-out crazy. Nobody has ever suggested that the filtering of a data stream to extract a particular target's communications somehow counts as surveillance of the entire stream. The implication here is that if NSA drops a Naurus box on a wire and automatically plucks out all the emails to or from a particular source, FISA is going to demand that the agency keep track of who owns every bit that passed through the machine, whether or not this other data was stored or seen by a human eye. In most cases, when this is done with the cooperation of an ISP, the government does not actually need to intercept the entire communications flow. But even leaving that aside, as tech reporter Declan McCullagh observes, "the scanning and filtering is done automatically in a split second and the results are not retained. Alleging this amounts to 'reviewing' -- something only a human can do -- is like complaining that your cat is voyeur for watching you have sex." So Roger's insinuation here is not just false; it is wildly, ludicrously, hobo tall-tale false. Basically, he's shouting "cybernets! complicated!" and hoping nobody will notice that what he's claiming is preposterous.

Privacy concerns are not trivial. The Constitution protects against "unreasonable" searches. But even with law enforcement, where the main function is ex post prosecution, not ex ante protection, there are numerous exceptions to the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. Yet Congress insists still on micromanaging the president -- and he, by failing to assert his authority early on, is now reduced to bargaining with Congress over minutia that will soon be as obsolete and dangerous as the underlying act is today.

Recall here that since we're breaking down the old "wall," information gathered as part of a foreign intel sweep—without a warrant or meaningful oversight if the intel bill passes—can be passed on to domestic law enforcement for use in plain vanilla criminal prosecutions. And what are the "minutiae" here? Details like: Will bulk collection of data without specified targets be permitted? Will courts be able to look into whether agencies are actually complying with minimization requirements designed to prevent the retention of information about innocent Americans? Can Congress learn how the FISA courts have interpreted the legislation they've passed? At what point does collection of information about a U.S. person become important enough a purpose of an investigation that it triggers a warrant requirement? Details, details.

John Locke, no sometime civil libertarian, put it well when he observed that the foreign affairs power "is much less capable to be directed by antecedent, standing, positive Laws, than [by] the Executive." The Federalist's authors, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, all agreed. The remedy for executive incompetence or recklessness in foreign affairs is political -- not legislative, much less legal. Congress, to say nothing of the courts, can no more manage such affairs than it can the economy. What better evidence than these surveillance fits and starts?

As long as we're quoting Locke, I rather prefer a passage that comes a few chapters later:

Where-ever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another's harm; and whosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law, and makes use of the force he has under his command, to compass that upon the subject, which the law allows not, ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another. This is acknowledged in subordinate magistrates. He that hath authority to seize my person in the street, may be opposed as a thief and a robber, if he endeavours to break into my house to execute a writ, notwithstanding that I know he has such a warrant, and such a legal authority, as will impower him to arrest me abroad. And why this should not hold in the highest, as well as in the most inferior magistrate, I would gladly be informed.

Roger is not the only voice on this subject emanating from Cato, but he's surely the loudest. And as we undertake the most sweeping revision of the nation's foreign intelligence framework in three decades, he's positioning himself—which in most people's minds will be equivalent to positioning the Institute—against accountability and oversight, against reasonable privacy safeguards, and (for what it's worth) against just about every other civil liberties group that has weighed in on the question. I respect that Roger's views are considered and sincerely held, and I regard it as a general virtue that Cato gives their scholars latitude to go off the reservation when that's where their thinking takes them. But I'm still appalled to see a voice for limited government crying for unlimited spying at the first hint of danger.

Addendum: I meant to note in the original post that Roger's stance when he's debated this in the past has been that, so long as the president says he's acting in the interests of national security, the only accountability to which he's subject—here or abroad—is political. Roll that around in your head for a minute. Political accountability For a classified secret surveillance program. Free cookie if you can spot the flaw in this logic.

Will Wilkinson on National Greatness Conservatism

a href="http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/01/25/must-destroy-milton-freedman/">Must… Destroy… Milton Freedman: Benjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey: “The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life.” Translation:

Libertarianism is dangerous because it discourages juvenile romantic attachment to higher things — meaningful things – like Honor, Virtue, and the indescribable joy of sacrificing one’s life to the service of the American Volksreich. All libertarians care about is superficial shit like not starving, living a long time, and being creative and happy. Blah blah blah. But, really, what’s the point of living to 200 if all you do is enjoy yourself the whole time? I mean, don‘t you want to know what it is like to kill a man? DON’T YOU WANT TO TASTE BLOOD!? Besides, virtue.

Vote John McCain.

Oh, goodness that’s not fair! But, really, that whole thing is just as embarrassing as misspelling ‘Friedman’. I am more and more coming to the conclusion that National Greatness Conservatism, like all quasi-fascist movements, is based on a weird romantic teenager’s fantasies about what it means to be a grown up. The fundamental moral decency of liberal individualism seems, to the unserious mind that thinks itself serious, completely insipid next to very exciting big boy ideas about shared struggle, sacrifice, duty, glory, virtue, and (most of all) power. And reading Aristotle in Greek.

I sometimes think that liberal individualism is something like the intellectual and moral equivalent of the best modernist design — spare, elegant, functional — but hard to grasp or truly appreciate without a cultivated sense of style, without a little discerning maturity. National Greatness Conservatism is like a grotesque wood-paneled den stuffed with animal heads, mounted swords, garish carpets, and a giant roaring fire. Only the most vulgar tuck in next to that fire, light a fat cigar, and think they’ve really got it all figured out. But I’m afraid that’s pretty much the kind of thing you get at the Committee on Social Thought. If you declaim the importance of virtue loudly enough, you don’t have to actually think.

Matthew Yglesias: Barack-as-Cudgel

Matthew Yglesias: I don't at all adhere to the school of thought that says "if Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks like Barack Obama, he must be evil." That said, I do think it's clear reading things like this doozy from Brooks today that one important driving force behind the sophisticated right's praise of Obama is a simple belief that he'll probably lose in the end. Then, when Clinton is nominated, having praised Obama to the skies they can lament that once again -- sigh -- the Democratic Party has let them down and they have no choice but to vote for the Republicans. The effort here is to somehow bracket the Bush years as just some kind of goofy one-off that we can forget about and remember that the real issue -- as it so often seems to be here in Washington -- is Bill Clinton's sex life. Or something.

It's all pretty inane. I've developed an increasingly strong preference for Obama in this race, but there's no gaping substantive void between them policywise. Certainly, I don't think I can think of any respect in which an Obama administration would more closely resemble a McCain administration than it would a Clinton administration. Meanwhile, McCain, despite some admirable qualities, shares Bush's lunatic conception of America's role in the world, declined to endorse any climate change measures that might actually solve the problem, and has pledged fealty to Bush's irresponsible tax policy in a way that makes it impossible for him to do much of anything innovative on the domestic front. There's a big, clear choice facing the country between the party of war, tax cuts, and the destruction of the planet and the other party -- the notion that the big story is the fortunes of the Clinton family is preposterous.

Reihan Salam: The Washington Independent | The Media | The American Scene

The Washington Independent | The Media | The American Scene: This post is kind of boring. But that also means no animals were murdered in the course of writing it, which means you can consume it without any guilt or trepidation.

A few weeks ago I made one of those predictions that are so obviously true as to be borderline witless, namely that we’re in the midst of the rise of the partisan media, a point made far more persuasively by David Frum and others. I’ll just add that this development is likely to have highlights as well as lowlights, and that The Washington Independent, which just launched today, will likely be one of the highlights. Sponsored by the Center for Independent Media, the site is part of a flourishing ecosystem of nonprofits, for-profits, think tanks, media outlets, and nontraditional pressure groups that’s grown out of the Howard Dean campaign and the broader (self-styled) progressive movement. As a webdesign fetishist, I was struck by the ease of navigation. I’d do things a little differently, to be sure (EveryBlock more closely reflects my aesthetic preferences), but it is a clean, fairly attractive look that captures the spirit of a lean blog-newspaper hybrid.

The Independent‘s staff is impressive, and landing Spencer Ackerman was a coup. As much as I disagree with Josh Marshall — I really, really disagree with him about a lot — I’m one of the people who thinks he deserves a Pulitzer. Now his innovative approach is finding converts — the Independent is stocked with veterans of traditional journalism. And talented alumni of Marshall’s School of Distributed Journalism are going to have a lasting impact on the media business.

One small quibble: two of the maiden opinion pieces, by Bruce Schulman and Michael Kazin, were disappointing, particularly Kazin’s (because I expected more from Kazin, a genuinely brilliant dude). Apart from being dry and not terribly provocative or surprising, they were both longer than I’d expect from an outfit that hopes to do something distinctly webby. That’s not to say webby needs to be short — note the dramatic success of Glenn Greenwald, who is very careful and very long-winded. Rather, it means the traditional, awkward op-ed length needn’t fence you in. Overall, though, I think this is a tremendously promising effort and I look forward to reading more.

Many moons ago, Patrick Ruffini predicted that the right’s failure to create comparable agenda-sitting institutions would prove costly. That will become very clear in the general election.

Matthew Yglesias: Why Is Jacob Weisberg Allowed Out without His Keeper?

Matthew Yglesias: Compassion: Jacob Weisberg, somewhat bizarrely, is sitting here in 2008 writing about Bush's "compassionate conservatism" as if it's a part of his persona that we ought to treat very seriously. Krugman wonders "Why are political writers still unaware that Bush’s phrase 'compassionate conservatism' wasn’t an acceptance of the Great Society, but rather a dog-whistle to the religious right?" Beyond that, why are political writers still unaware that politicians deliberately lie in order to enhance the popularity of their political prospects? Compassionate conservatism obviously wasn't just a dog-whistle, it was also deliberately designed to foster an impression of a more moderate strain of Republicanism. And, indeed, to do that you had to toss some meat into the soup:

The following year, in 2003, Mr. Bush pressed his case for invading Iraq and uttered the infamous 16 words (“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”). But alongside that disingenuous indictment, Mr. Bush presented Congress with a new raft of centrist-minded initiatives: $450 million to minister to the needs of children of prisoners, $600 million to treat drug addicts, $1.2 billion for hydrogen-powered cars, $10 billion in new money to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean.

You need to put $450 million into some kind of context relative to the federal budget -- $450 million is tiny. $450 million is the kind of budget request you make when you don't really care about the issue at hand but are hoping to gull innumerate reporters into writing about your $450 million initiative as if it were roughly on par with your proposed war whose costs run three orders of magnitude higher.

Similarly with the hydrogen cars. Spending $1.2 billion on hydrogen-powered cars certainly could be an element of a centrist environmental policy. Certainly what doling out a subsidy like that suggests, logically speaking, is concern about carbon emissions and global warming. And of course, that's exactly the suggestion the subsidy was intended to implant but the Bush administration isn't concerned about carbon emissions and global warming at all. They hand out tons and tons of subsidies to the oil and coal industries, they steadfastly oppose all limits to curb carbon emissions, and they act like a diplomatic wrecking ball at international conferences.

Compassionate conservatism was, in practice, nothing more than spin and a vague gesture at a higher-order justification for corruption. It's bad enough that the press got spun at the time, but to look backward from a Bush-critical perspective and get spun all over again is bizarre. Look at Bush -- he used to care and now he doesn't! But no, he never cared; what everyone can now see is what people who looked at his policies in detail and in context could see clearly back in 1999-2003.

Jonathan Chait: Is the Right Right on the Clintons?

Is the right right on the Clintons? - Los Angeles Times: Hillary's campaign tactics are causing some liberals to turn against the couple.

Something strange happened the other day. All these different people -- friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read -- kept saying the same thing: They've suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons.

The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing for her suggested that she might not be a good Democratic nominee. But now that loathing seems a lot less irrational. We're not frothing Clinton haters like ... well, name pretty much any conservative. We just really wish they'd go away.

The big turning point seems to be this week, when the Clintons slammed Obama for acknowledging that Ronald Reagan changed the country. Everyone knows Reagan changed the country. Bill and Hillary have said he changed the country. But they falsely claimed that Obama praised Reagan's ideas, saying he was a better president than Clinton -- something he didn't say and surely does not believe.

This might have been the most egregious case, but it wasn't the first. Before the New Hampshire primaries, Clinton supporters e-mailed pro-choice voters claiming that Obama was suspect on abortion rights because he had voted "present" instead of "no" on some votes. (In fact, the president of the Illinois chapter of Planned Parenthood said she had coordinated strategy with Obama and wanted him to vote "present.") Recently, there have been waves of robocalls in South Carolina repeatedly attacking "Barack Hussein Obama."

I crossed the Clinton Rubicon a couple of weeks ago when, in the course of introducing Hillary, Clinton supporter and Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson invoked Obama's youthful drug use. This was disgusting on its own terms, but worse still if you know anything about Johnson. I do -- I once wrote a long profile of him. He has a sleazy habit of appropriating the logic of civil rights for his own financial gain. He also has a habit of aiding conservative crusades to eliminate the estate tax and privatize Social Security by falsely claiming they redistribute wealth from African Americans to whites. The episode reminded me of the Clintons' habit of surrounding themselves with the most egregious characters: Dick Morris, Marc Rich and so on.

The Clinton campaign is trying to make it seem as if the complaint is about negativity, and it is pointing out that Obama has criticized Hillary as well. That's what politicians are supposed to do when they compete for votes. But criticism isn't the same thing as lying and sleaze-mongering.

Am I starting to sound like a Clinton hater? It's a scary thought. Of course, to conservatives, it's a delicious thought. The Wall Street Journal published a gloating editorial noting that liberals had suddenly learned "what everyone else already knows about the Clintons." (By "everyone," it means Republicans.)

It made me wonder: Were the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all along? Maybe not right to set up a perjury trap so they could impeach him, but right about the Clintons' essential nature? Fortunately, the Journal's attempt to convince us that the Clintons have always been unscrupulous liars seemed to prove the opposite. Its examples of Clintonian lies were their claims that Bob Dole wanted to cut Medicare, that there was a vast right-wing conspiracy, that Paula Jones was "trailer trash" and that Kenneth Starr was a partisan.

Except Dole did vote to cut Medicare, there was a vast right-wing conspiracy and Starr was and is a rabid partisan. ("Trailer trash" is, of course, a matter of opinion, and it's a cruel thing to say, but as far as whether it's a lie -- well, it's not like they called William F. Buckley "trailer trash.")

So maybe the answer is that the Clintons would have smeared their opponents in the 1990s, but lying is unnecessary when the other party is doing things such as voting to slash Medicare to pay for a big tax cut for the rich.

But the conservatives might have had a point about the Clintons' character. Bill's affair with Monica Lewinsky jeopardized the whole progressive project for momentary pleasure. The Clintons gleefully triangulated the Democrats in Congress to boost his approval rating. They do seem to have a feeling of entitlement to power.

If Hillary wins the nomination, most of us will probably vote for her because the alternative is likely to be worse. But what happens if she's embroiled in another scandal? Will liberals rally behind her, or will they remember the Democratic primary?

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Jonathan Chait, a contributing editor to Opinion and a senior editor at the New Republic, is the author of "The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics."

Matthew Yglesias: Libertarians and Democracy

Matthew Yglesias: Libertarians and Democracy: Tyler Cowen says he agrees that market operations will be flawed due to the irrationality of the participants, but "relative to social democrats, I tend to think that politicians are irrational actors trying to pander to irrational voters and that it can't be any other way. I am much less optimistic about democracy as an instrument for fine-tuning good policy or for that matter as a medium for enforcing progressive sentiments." This is similar to Bryan Caplan's argument for libertarianism in The Myth of the Rational Voter.

Libertarians have always been against democracy (the rapprochement with democracy being one of the key steps in the transition from classical to modern liberalism) but this new vintage of arguments is a curious inversion of the traditional line of attack. The main problem used to be the fear that voters were too rational and that the unlimited prerogatives of property had to be protected through a lack of democracy. Now the fear is that the dire consequences of democracy can best be preserved through the unlimited prerogatives of property.

Needless to say I think this is wrong along several dimensions. One point of dispute, though, is that to me the idea of state committed to neutral and effective administration of justice around laissez faire lines seems like an illusion. The alternative to reasonably effective democratic institutions and a viable left-wing political movement isn't free markets but the capture of the state by large economic interests as during the Gilded Age or, indeed, the Bush administration.

Matthew Yglesias on the Scum that Is National Review

Matthew Yglesias: Observances (Media): Here's a screen shot from yesterday's National Review Online. Not even a token actual remembrance of Martin Luther King, JR. or a nod in the direction of the civil rights movement. Nope, to the editors of NRO MLK Day stands purely as a good opportunity to discuss the thesis that one important source of injustice in the United States is that black people have things too easy thanks to "preferences." Of course, I suppose it is a step forward from Will Herberg's September 7, 1965 National Review article, "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?" (note the scare quotes around civil rights):

For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.

The lawlessness of "massive resistance" to court-ordered desegregation didn't , of course, much bother National Review. Nor did the lawlessness of widespread efforts throughout the South to deny African-Americans their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But civil disobedience? Affirmative action? That stuff stirs the heart to protest -- something must be done!

A.J. Rossmiller: Getting Iraq WRONG... Again: Michael O'Hanlon, Fred Kagan, and Jack Keane

TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: GETTING IRAQ WRONG . . . AGAIN.

This has got to be embarrassing for the Washington Post. Or it would be, if their editorial board had the capacity for shame. Three days ago, WaPo ran a big Sunday op-ed on Iraq by three of the biggest supporters -- Michael O'Hanlon, Fred Kagan, and Gen. Jack Keane -- of the "surge," a piece whose opening sentence touted the success of the troop buildup by citing the recent de-Baathification law as "an important step toward political reconciliation." Today, however, a front page WaPo story reports what many of us said from the beginning: the law is not an indication of political compromise, but rather a misleadingly-named Shia effort to further sideline an already outraged Sunni populace.

The article reports, "Approved by parliament this month under pressure from U.S. officials, the law was heralded by President Bush and Iraqi leaders as a way to soothe the deep anger of many ex-Baathists -- primarily Sunnis but also many Shiites such as Awadi -- toward the Shiite-led government." Except that, of course, it did nothing of the kind: "More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation." Oops! One prominent Sunni politician even described it as "bait," saying the law is set up so ex-Baathists have to go to a specific location to register, where, he says, they're likely to be killed.

Observers like Kagan, Keene, and O'Hanlon have demonstrated again and again that they don't understand Iraq. They may understand the military, but when it comes to the vital political issues involved, they either don't have a clue or they're dissembling on the prime journalistic real estate of the leading news outlet in our nation's capital. Either way, it's disgraceful.

Eric Boehlert: New Hampshire, the press, and incompetence

Media Matters - New Hampshire, the press, and incompetence: The dismal truth about New Hampshire was this: Never has a Granite State primary received so much media attention and been covered by so many journalists. And never has the press so badly botched a New Hampshire vote.

Recall that one of the apparent turning points in the New Hampshire primary came during the January 5 ABC News-Facebook debate, broadcast by ABC News, when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) launched a passionate soliloquy about her accomplishments and her desire to "make change" after an opponent tagged her as being "status quo." Her forceful response created an immediate buzz in the debate's press room.

And for good reason. Election observers often love these kinds of unscripted outbursts since they not only break up the campaign trail monotony, where tightly controlled messages are the norm, but they can sometimes define a candidate and a race. It was Ronald Reagan's famous New Hampshire debate eruption back in 1980 -- "I am paying for this microphone!" -- that established him as a fighter.

Not so for Clinton. At least not among the press corps, which immediately pounced. Time's Karen Tumulty claimed Clinton's "flash of anger" had reporters "gasping in shock." Time.com's political blog, Swampland, quickly posted an item about how Clinton's debate response might be the moment observers looked back and pinpointed when Clinton "lost" New Hampshire and the nomination. ABC News' Jake Tapper claimed Clinton became so enraged onstage that he couldn't even "understand what she was saying," and either way, it was likely to "recoil" voters. NBC's Chuck Todd announced that the exchange was "not good" for Clinton. The New York Observer asserted that Clinton was "almost screaming." (She was not.) And after watching the debate, The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach suggested that Clinton's campaign needed to fit the former first lady with an electric shock collar that could zap her when she went astray -- when she became "screechy" -- like a dog being trained on an invisible fence.

It was quite amazing: A roomful of mainstream journalists, representing a host of different backgrounds, ages, and perspectives, all watched the debate and they all came to the exact same conclusion about Clinton's signature response: She blew it big time.

What was also telling was that none of those pronouncements were based on what voters in New Hampshire thought of the debate, or of Clinton's response. They were based solely on what journalists thought of the debate. And they hated Clinton's show of passion.

It turns out ABC News had assembled a focus group of voters to watch the debate and, according to Time, "hooked up voters with electrodes to monitor their brain activity. [Clinton's] flash of anger when the boys ganged up played well with all of them." But again, what did Jake Tapper do? Without checking in with any New Hampshire citizens, he immediately posted an item, which was then linked on the Drudge Report, that announced that Clinton's anger would likely cause voters to "recoil."

In today's campaign coverage, what journalists think about unfolding events takes precedence over what voters think. Voters have become essentially secondary, props in the background that are occasionally queried for a color quote. And that's a big reason why the press missed the New Hampshire story -- that, and the fact that the press was so anxious to write Clinton off as "toast."

It's true that most of the polling data failed to predict Clinton's strong showing in New Hampshire, which also explains why the press corps was caught so off-guard. But the fact remains that there appears to have been a massive voter shift within the New Hampshire electorate in the 72 hours before the vote, a massive shift that nobody in the media detected.

As Media Matters for America's Eric Alterman noted last week, virtually all the corporate press does these days is shallow, polling-based horserace coverage, and now it can't even get that right.

I agree that, normally, the statewide shift that took place in the Granite State might be difficult for journalists to detect. But this was New Hampshire, and a) it isn't that large, or populous, of a state; and b) it was crawling with journalists.

I mean, isn't that why an army of reporters, pundits, and producers numbering in the thousands descended upon New Hampshire, to put their ears to the ground and canvass the state like no other? To get an X-ray-like read on the voters and their concerns? Or did journalists simply descend upon New Hampshire to follow candidates around in a herd while complaining about a lack of access, to read the same polling results they could have read in Washington, D.C., or New York City, and to cling to the same Beltway narrative about the unfolding election?

Where was the journalism? After watching the New Hampshire returns come in, Butch Ward at Poynter Online, a journalism think tank, wrote:

I was struck by how little anyone told me about why people in New Hampshire voted as they did. At one point, I heard the briefest of snippets on one channel that exit polls showed New Hampshire voters had been most concerned with the economy. ... But no one was telling me why. Why? With all of this polling power, why couldn't someone tell me why? After almost a year of nonstop coverage, why can't someone tell me what the most important players in this election -- the voters -- are thinking?

Yet even after the New Hampshire press debacle, editors at the Politico, the Beltway house organ for conventional wisdom, insisted: "Things are not all bad. Politico is part of a broad, technology-inspired movement that has led to more open and more exhaustive coverage of this presidential race than ever before."

The only thing the Politico has covered exhaustively is meaningless tactical campaign nonsense. To read the Politico is to understand that its writers and editors are practically allergic to actual voters. But that's today's media norm.

Here's a perfect example: When Clinton arrived to campaign in New Hampshire following her Iowa loss, she made an obvious tactical adjustment and began engaging with voters more directly, sometimes hours at a time during marathon Q&A sessions. The press dutifully noted the change and then promptly ridiculed it. At washingtonpost.com, Dana Milbank narrated a video piece that thoroughly mocked a New Hampshire rally Clinton hosted, in which she answered questions for hours, declaring the Clinton candidacy effectively over. (The video came complete with a wildly unflattering photo of Clinton.)

Not one voter was interviewed in the three-minute-long video. Instead, it was the journalist who declared Clinton's performance to be a "torpid" "bore." Turns out, voters, based on the final New Hampshire tally, had a very different take on things. Had Milbank bothered to interview some actual voters, maybe he could have saved himself the embarrassment of so badly misreading New Hampshire. (I suppose the word "embarrassment" only applies if Milbank actually cares he was so wrong. I have my doubts.)

Meanwhile, ABC's World News last week described a detailed answer Clinton gave to a voter regarding real estate insurance as "tedious." And according to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, while listening to one of Clinton's issue-driven New Hampshire stump speeches, "a colleague in the press section leaned over to dismiss her for offering nothing but 'a laundry list of wonkery.' "

Note the press' catty performance during this January 5 Clinton campaign event, where the candidate met with undecided young voters and, according to The New York Observer, answered questions in eight-minute intervals:

Reporters sandwiched together in the scrum studied their BlackBerrys and rolled their eyes. One whispered to another sarcastically, "Can you feel the excitement?" Another asked: "Can you please pour some Drano in my mouth?" They began taking bets on who in the audience would fall asleep first. Former CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer said to the rest of the pack: "This event is taking so long we could all grow beards by the end of it."

We know now that as Clinton connected with undecided voters over kitchen-table issues, the critical New Hampshire vote was literally changing right in front of campaign reporters. But they were too busy deriding Clinton -- cracking jokes about drinking Drano -- that they failed to notice the shifting political landscape.

One of the few examples of temperature-taking among voters that I came across last week was posted by Tumulty at Swampland on the day of the primary; after she talked to a waitress named Katie, who, after watching the New Hampshire debate, switched her vote over to Clinton because "she stands her ground."

Perhaps more old-fashioned interaction with voters would have clued the press into the outcome.

Should we be surprised by the media's incompetence? This is, after all, the same modern-day press corps that is still writing about John Edwards' haircut, and during the autumn months, thought Hillary Clinton's laugh was an issue of monumental importance. Perhaps it was not unexpected that when it came time to cover an actual primary vote, the press corps seemed woefully unprepared.

The press has literally forgotten how to do its job, forgotten how to simply be spectators instead of trying to insert themselves as players. As Tom Brokaw famously mentioned on MSNBC on primary night, (arrogant) journalists need to remove themselves from the process and stop trying to affect the outcome. Elections are about voters, not journalists.

Meanwhile, what was mostly overlooked among the media chattering class as it went through the motions of post-New Hampshire faux hand-wringing was that the press was wearing blinders that kept journalists from accurately capturing the temperature in New Hampshire.

Looking back on the New Hampshire debacle, Matt Bai conceded on The New York Times' political blog, The Caucus, "In retrospect, we should have guessed then that the ground was shifting in New Hampshire."

Y'think? Bai blames the media's blindness on an obsession with polling. The truth is the press didn't want to acknowledge the ground was shifting because it liked the erroneous storyline that the Clinton campaign was imploding. (Paging Matt Drudge.) The press was practically celebrating it on the eve of the New Hampshire vote. That's a result of the open contempt many journalists express for Clinton and her campaign. It was that same contempt that produced at-times overtly sexist coverage of the candidate, "a nearly pornographic investment in Clinton's demise" by male pundits, wrote Salon.com's Rebecca Traister.

The disdain for Clinton has been openly broadcast by journalists. Appearing on CNN's Reliable Sources on December 30, The Washington Post's Milbank announced: "The press will savage [Clinton] no matter what."

And just hours before primary day, The New Republic's Jason Zengerle filed this dispatch from the campaign trail:

I was at a dinner tonight with various political reporters who are up here to cover the happenings, and it was pretty funny how giddy/relieved they were at the prospect of a McCain-Obama general election campaign, as opposed to, say, a Romney-Clinton one. Suddenly, the next 11 months of their lives look a whole lot more enjoyable.

That's right, on the eve of the New Hampshire vote, there were mainstream journalists announcing that the press would "savage" Clinton no matter what she did, as well as acknowledging that "giddy" reporters were gathered around dinner tables toasting the demise of her candidacy.

That's how you would expect Clinton's political opponents to react to the news of her faltering campaign. Since when do journalists -- reporters -- think it's OK to mobilize themselves and actively oppose a presidential campaign?

Another dismal truth from New Hampshire: The press is no longer up to the task of helping us pick our next president.

U.S. Marine Corps (1940), Small Wars Manual

U.S. Marine Corps (1940), Small Wars Manual

Christopher Hayes: Populism's Candidate

Populism's Candidate: This mill town of 10,000 people lies about ten miles from the Maine border. For more than a hundred years its sole economic engine was the paper mill that sits on the Androscoggin River; but like the other paper mill towns in the area, it's been brought low by the sledgehammer of creative destruction. In 2006 the owners closed the mill and laid off its 250 workers, and last year they detonated three of the four smokestacks. You can watch them die on YouTube, pitching over in slow motion like trees falling under the ax.

At 2 am on the Monday before the New Hampshire primary, about two dozen John Edwards supporters stood outside a fire station in downtown Berlin awaiting the arrival of the candidate and his wife as they crisscrossed the state in a final thirty-six-hour push. Murray Rogers, president of the Steelworkers local in the area, was one of those who came out in the middle of the night to greet the Edwardses, holding a sign and flanked by two of his fellow union members. After working for thirty-six years in the Wausau paper mill, one town over in Groveton, he lost his job along with 300 others when it was closed December 31. Edwards's people "were the first ones there," Rogers told me as we stood outside the firehouse. "They offered to come and help us. He wrote a letter to the CEO because of the poor severance package they gave us, on our behalf. None of the others even offered to come. It's a pretty strong message to us who cares and who doesn't."

The triumph of global capital and crony capitalism over the past several decades has created a country of Silicon Valleys and Berlins, SoHo lofts and storm-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward bungalows. The last time Edwards ran for President, he called this the "Two Americas" and promised to stitch them together. But from the day Edwards announced this campaign in the Lower Ninth, he has presented himself as a warrior for one of those Americas as it fights to wrest back some of the ill-gotten gains from the other one--the "moneyed interests" and "entrenched corporate power" that have a "stranglehold on our democracy."

This populism makes the establishment media uncomfortable: consummate Beltway pundit Stuart Rothenberg recently worried in a column that the stock market would tank the day after Edwards was elected. When the Des Moines Register endorsed Hillary Clinton, it chided the 2008 populist incarnation of Edwards for his "harsh anti-corporate rhetoric." But "harsh" pretty accurately sums up the country's judgment of the past seven years. In New Hampshire exit polls, two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republican voters said they were "angry" with the Bush Administration. The economy was the top issue in both parties, with nine out of ten voters expressing anxiety about it. All of which should redound to Edwards's benefit. The coalition envisioned by his campaign would stack different classes atop one another until the sum towered over a conservative minority of plutocrats. It would bring together the urban poor, the working poor in far-flung exurbs, the white working class in shuttered mill towns and the deeply anxious college-educated middle class. But it has been unable to put such a coalition together. When election day had come and gone, Edwards managed only 23 percent even on the favorable terrain of Berlin; Hillary Clinton won the town easily with 50 percent of the vote.

Edwards and his campaign point out that they've been fighting uphill: out-fundraised and outspent in Iowa six to one (probably closer to three to one, when independent 527 expenditures are figured in) and constantly contending with a press corps that, in the words of one Edwards staffer, "has never found a place for us in their story." These disadvantages are compounded by the shortcomings of Edwards's message. He almost never, unprompted, says a word about foreign policy; his pugilism can get the better of him (as when he took a cheap, sexist shot at Clinton for tearing up); and his stump speech, sharp and focused and righteous as it may be, is also so full of pathos it prompted something close to muted despair in me every time I heard it. Watching Nataline Sarkisyan's family give a raw, emotional account of their daughter's death in a hospital after Cigna waited too long to approve a liver transplant, I felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through my sternum. I couldn't imagine calling voters or knocking on doors or even going to polls. And I don't think it was just me. Unlike at Obama and Clinton rallies, where the crowds cheer at the slightest provocation, during most of Edwards's stump speech you can hear a pin drop. It's a bit like attending a funeral for the American dream.

New Hampshire proved that writing off campaigns or predicting outcomes is a mug's game. But no matter who wins the Democratic nomination, the fact remains that the Edwards campaign has set the domestic policy agenda for the entire field. He was the first with a bold universal healthcare plan, the first with an ambitious climate change proposal that called for cap-and-trade, and the leader on reforming predatory lending practices and raising the minimum wage to a level where it regains its lost purchasing power. Edwards's rhetoric has started to bleed into his rivals' speeches as well. "Too many have been invisible for too long," Clinton said in her victory speech Tuesday night. "Well, you are not invisible to me. The oil companies, the drug companies, the health insurance companies, the predatory student loan companies have had seven years of a President who stands up for them. It's time we had a President who stands up for all of you."

Edwards maintains that he's not going anywhere, saying that fighting corporate power on behalf of working people is the "cause of my life." Senior campaign adviser Joe Trippi stresses that the campaign is lean enough that it can continue through the convention, picking up delegates along the way, but the endgame for that strategy is unclear. Ultimately, though, the Edwards campaign has been both a campaign and a cause, with the latter outperforming the former. Few remember that the signature economic policy of Bill Clinton's presidency, balancing the budget, originated as a plank in the platform of his primary rival Paul Tsongas. If the next Democratic President manages to pass universal healthcare or a carbon cap-and-trade, we'll owe the Edwards campaign a significant debt.

Matthew Yglesias: Democrats for Romney

Matthew Yglesias: Given that there's no Democratic primary in Michigan and Michigan has an open primary, Kos offers the devilish suggestions that Democrats and Democrat-friendly independents should turn out and vote for Mitt Romney, who seems like a much easier general election opponent in November.

I'll only note that there's no reason one need be so cynical about it. I would much rather live under President Clinton or President Obama than under President Romney, but I'd take President Romney over President McCain or President Huckabee. Romney's a pathetic liar and he's running on a shitty agenda, but in a pinch you can say that the man has a track-record of managerial competence that Huckabee and McCain distinctly lack. Meanwhile, Romney appears not to quite have either McCain's zeal for war or Huckabee's zeal for not knowing what he's talking about. So there's really no downside to going and casting a ballot for Romney.

Virginia Postrel: The Libertarian Turnip Truck, Cont'd

Dynamist Blog: The Libertarian Turnip Truck, Cont'd: In response to my post below about Ron Paul, reader Bill Sullivan writes:

My wife and I were big Ron Paul supporters (until yesterday, in fact). We're also 29 and 30 years old, which means we weren't paying attention to Ron Paul in the 90's. We donated money to the campaign, and I suppose we failed to do the due diligence on Paul, as we didn't dig through archives of his old newsletters. We feel terrifically betrayed, not only by Ron Paul, but by older libertarians like yourself for not publicly warning us about him. If you knew he was such bad news and that he was becoming one of the biggest mainstream representatives of libertarian thought, why didn't you warn us? I've been reading your work for about ten years, and I consider you a very fair and smart writer and if you had given a public warning about Ron Paul, I, for one, would have listened. But now my wife and I and probably thousands of other young libertarians and libertarian sympathizers have been tricked into supporting something that sickens me. Even your colleague at the Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, was taken in among lots of other public people. I'm stunned by what Ron Paul turned out to be, but I'm also stunned that waited to mention him until it was too late to do any good.

Bill makes a good point. Someone should have told him. There are plenty of people who get paid to do that sort of thing. I did not mean to criticize the essentially apolitical people like him and his wife who heard some good things from Paul and decided to support him.

As I told Bill in an email, I was never particularly interested in the Paul campaign, which I considered a fringe effort in both its chances (nil) and much of its rhetoric (too many conspiracies). Rightly or wrongly, I didn't consider Paul "one of the biggest mainstream representatives of libertarian thought." I'm not sure whether I would have written about him if I had. Life is short, I don't make my living as a professional libertarian any more, and I don't feel responsible for commenting on every libertarian-related development that comes along. These days, I am more interested in understanding culture and economics than focusing on policy, much less policing the libertarian movement. Plus, as the Paulites will be quick to note, I disagree with Paul on his sexiest issue, the Iraq war (and on his second sexiest issue, opposition to immigration).

I do fault my friends at Reason, who are much cooler than I'll ever be and who, scornful of the earnestness that takes politics seriously, apparently didn't do their homework before embracing Paul as the latest indicator of libertarian cachet. For starters, they might have asked my old boss Bob Poole about Ron Paul; I remember a board member complaining about Paul's newsletters back in the early '90s. Besides, people as cosmopolitan as Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch should be able to detect something awry in Paul's populist appeals. (Note that by "cosmopolitan" I do not mean "Jewish." I mean cosmopolitan.) I suspect they did but decided it was more useful to spin things their way than to take Paul's record and ideas seriously. As for Andrew Sullivan, his political infatuations are not his strong point as a commentator.

UPDATE: I've found the Texas Monthly Ron Paul profile, alluded to in the earlier post.

UPDATE 2: Tim Cavanaugh has a smart take on the Paul controversy, made all the better by his swipe at Jim Crow-lover Woodrow Wilson. [Via Hit & Run.]

Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen: The Micromagic of Microcredit

Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen (2008), The Micromagic of Microcredit:

To better understand this puzzle, we must set aside some of our preconceptions about how saving operates in poor countries, most of all in rural areas. Westerners typically save in the form of money or ­money-­denominated assets such as stocks and bonds. But in poor communities, money is often an ineffective medium for savings; if you want to know how much net saving is going on, don’t look at money. Banks may be a ­day­long bus ride away or may be plagued, as in Ghana, by fraud. A cash hoard kept at home can be lost, stolen, taken by the taxman, damaged by floods, or even eaten by rats. It creates other kinds of problems as well. Needy friends and relatives knock on the door and ask for aid. In small communities it is often very hard, even impossible, to say no, especially if you have the cash on ­hand.

People who have even extremely modest wealth are also asked to perform more community service, or to pay more to finance community rituals and festivals. In rural Guerrero State, in Mexico, for example, one of us (Cowen) found that most people who saved cash did not manage to hold on to it for more than a few weeks or even days. A dollar saved translates into perhaps a quarter of that wealth kept. It is as if cash savings faces an implicit “tax rate” of 75 ­percent.

Under these kinds of conditions, a cow (or a goat or pig) is a much better medium for saving. It is sturdier than paper money. Friends and relatives can’t ask for small pieces of it. If you own a cow, it yields milk, it can plow the fields, it produces dung that can be used as fuel or fertilizer, and in a pinch it can be slaughtered and turned into saleable ­meat or simply eaten. With a small loan, people in rural areas can buy that cow and use cash that might otherwise be diverted to less useful purposes to pay back the microcredit institution. So even when microcredit looks like indebtedness, savings are going up rather than down.

Microcredit is making people’s lives better around the world. But for the most part, it is not pulling them out of poverty. It is hard to find entrepreneurs who start with these tiny loans and graduate to run commercial empires. Bang­la­desh, where Gram­een Bank was born, is still a desperately poor country. The more modest truth is that microcredit may help some people, perhaps earning $2 a day, to earn something like $2.50 a day. That may not sound dramatic, but when you are earning $2 a day it is a big step forward. And progress is not the natural state of humankind; microcredit is important even when it does nothing more than stave off ­decline.

With microcredit, life becomes more bearable and easier to manage. The improvements may not show up as an explicit return on investment, but the benefits are very real. If a poor family is able to keep a child in school, send someone to a clinic, or build up more secure savings, its ­well-­being improves, if only marginally. This is a big part of the reason why poor people are demanding greater access to microcredit loans. And microcredit, unlike many charitable services, is capable of paying for ­itself—­which explains why the private sector is increasingly involved. The future of microcredit lies in the commercial sector, not in unsustainable aid programs. Count this as another ­benefit.

If this portrait sounds a little underwhelming, don’t blame microcredit. The real issue is that we so often underestimate the severity and inertia of global poverty. Natalie Portman may not be right when she says that an end to poverty is “just a mouse click away,” but she’s right to be supportive of a tool that helps soften some of poverty’s worst blows for many millions of desperate ­people.

Stephen Roach: America’s inflated asset prices must fall

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - America’s inflated asset prices must fall: By Stephen Roach Published: January 7 2008 17:55 | Last updated: January 7 2008 17:55

The US has been the main culprit behind the destabilising global imbalances of recent years. America’s massive current account deficit absorbs about 75 per cent of the world’s surplus saving. Most believe that a weaker US dollar is the best cure for these imbalances. Yet a broad measure of the US dollar has dropped 23 per cent since February 2002 in real terms, with only minimal impact on America’s gaping external imbalance. Dollar bears argue that more currency depreciation is needed. Protectionists insist that China – which has the largest bilateral trade imbalance with the US – should bear a disproportionate share of the next downleg in the US dollar.

There is good reason to doubt this view. America’s current account deficit is due more to bubbles in asset prices than to a misaligned dollar. A resolution will require more of a correction in asset prices than a further depreciation of the dollar. At the core of the problem is one of the most insidious characteristics of an asset-dependent economy – a chronic shortfall in domestic saving. With America’s net national saving averaging a mere 1.4 per cent of national income over the past five years, the US has had to import surplus saving from abroad to keep growing. That means it must run massive current account and trade deficits to attract the foreign capital.

America’s aversion toward saving did not appear out of thin air. Waves of asset appreciation – first equities and, more recently, residential property – convinced citizens that a new era was at hand. Reinforced by a monstrous bubble of cheap credit, there was little perceived need to save the old-fashioned way – out of income. Assets became the preferred vehicle of choice.

With one bubble begetting another, America’s imbalances rose to epic proportions. Despite generally subpar income generation, private consumption soared to a record 72 per cent of real gross domestic product in 2007. Household debt hit a record 133 per cent of disposable personal income. And income-based measures of personal saving moved back into negative territory in late 2007.

None of these trends is sustainable. It is only a question of when they give way and what it takes to spark a long overdue rebalancing. A sharp decline in asset prices is necessary to rebalance the US economy. It is the only realistic hope to shift the mix of saving away from asset appreciation back to that supported by income generation. That could entail as much as a 20-30 per cent decline in overall US housing prices and a related deflating of the bubble of cheap and easy credit.

Those trends now appear to be under way. Reflecting an outsize imbalance between supply and demand for new homes, residential property prices fell 6 per cent in the year ending October 2007 for 20 major metropolitan areas in the US, according to the S&P Case-Shiller Index. Most likely, this foretells a broader downturn in nationwide home prices in 2008 that could continue into 2009. Meanwhile, courtesy of the subprime crisis, the credit bubble has popped – ending the cut-rate funding that fuelled the housing bubble.

As home prices move into a protracted period of decline, consumers will finally recognise the perils of bubble-distorted saving strategies. Financially battered households will respond by rebuilding income-based saving balances. That means the consumption share of gross domestic product will fall and the US economy will most likely tumble into recession.

America’s shift back to income-supported saving will be a pivotal development for the rest of the world. As consumption slows and household saving rises in the US, the need to import surplus saving from abroad will diminish. Demand for foreign capital will recede – leading to a reduction of both the US current-account and trade deficits. The global economy will emerge bruised, but much better balanced.

Washington policymakers and politicians need to stand back and let this adjustment play out. Yet the US body politic is panicking in response – underwriting massive liquidity injections that produce another asset bubble and proposing fiscal pump-priming that would depress domestic saving even further. Such actions can only compound the problems that got America into this mess in the first place.

China-bashers in the US Congress also need to stand down. America does not have a China problem – it has a multilateral trade deficit with over 40 countries. The China bilateral imbalance may be the biggest contributor to the overall US trade imbalance but, in large part, this is a result of supply-chain decisions by US multinationals.

By focusing incorrectly on the dollar and putting pressure on the Chinese currency, Congress would only shift China’s portion of the US trade deficit elsewhere – most likely to a higher-cost producer. That would be the same as a tax hike on American workers. If the US returns to income-based saving in the aftermath of the bursting of housing and credit bubbles, its multilateral trade deficit will narrow and the Chinese bilateral imbalance will shrink.

It is going to be a very painful process to break the addiction to asset-led behaviour. No one wants recessions, asset deflation and rising unemployment. But this has always been the potential endgame of a bubble-prone US economy. The longer America puts off this reckoning, the steeper the ultimate price of adjustment. Tough as it is, the only sensible way out is to let markets lead the way. That is what the long overdue bursting of America’s asset and credit bubbles is all about.

Rick Perlstein: Review of Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?"

Perlstein's Greatest Hits, Vol. 4: | Campaign for America's Future: Scenes from the front lines of the American Liberal Media Expeditionary Force’s campaign to rout the forces of conservatism:

• CNN, which right-wingers have been known to call the “Clinton News Network,” chooses as its lead commentator for George W. Bush’s spring 2002 Middle East policy speech . . . Pat Robertson.

• On the crucial Manhattan front, New York magazine fields as its sole national correspondent one of the editors of The Weekly Standard; the New York Observer carries a regular column by a National Review editor; rabid liberal-hater Michael Kelly leaves his watch as The New Yorker’s Washington columnist to take over the “liberal” New Republic, then the “liberal” Atlantic, now columnizing in the “liberal” Washington Post — joined there by conservatives George Will, Robert Novak, Charles Krauthammer, and a guest battalion sermonizing on the wisdom of war with Iraq.

• Rock-and-decadence Rolling Stone holds down the culture-war front with conservatives P.J. O’Rourke and Tom Wolfe.

• In the Internet theater, genuinely liberal Salon includes among its cadre of columnists David Horowitz and Andrew Sullivan. Slate recruits a Weekly Standard editor as a regular, and even features articles by Charles Murray.

• On the networks: NBC uses Rush Limbaugh as an election analyst in 2002, Robert Bork as a commentator during the Clinton impeachment (ABC chooses William Bennett), and CBS rewards correspondent Bernard Goldberg for publishing an anti-CBS op-ed screed by moving him to a cushy job with better benefits.

With friends like these, my fellow liberals, who needs enemies?

It’s one of the best arguments to be found in Eric Alterman’s new book: in outlets classed by conservatives as liberal, and even in ones that are actually liberal, the other side is routinely invited in as part of the mix. In conservative publications, almost never.

It wasn’t always so. In the early decades of its existence the National Review frequently ran liberal, and even Marxist, writers, including John Kenneth Galbraith, Murray Kempton, and Eugene Genovese. When I had a chance to sit down with William F. Buckley a couple of years ago, I reminded him of that tradition, and lamented its passing. It turned out that recollection of same had escaped him: we never ran liberals, he told me. I wondered about the reason for the memory lapse: perhaps, at this late date — post-Whitewater, postimpeachment, in the full flower of Limbaughism — that there once was a time when conservatives could fraternize with liberals was literally unimaginable to them.

Why do the conservative media fight politics as a life-and-death struggle whereas an avowed leftist like me can look at an old tradition like National Review’s publishing liberals and conservatives side by side and think it’s kind of nifty? That contrast, between conservative bunkerism and liberal openness, speaks to the very structural heart of the difference between conservatives and liberals. We Americans love to cite the “political spectrum” as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles.

To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world — a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman’s republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon.

This is why conservatives spy left-wing authoritarians everywhere. Seeing the world in terms of norms and presuming others do the same, they easily mistake a liberal tolerance for diverse options, even unconventional options, as an endorsement of the unconventional options. The presence of gay people on TV, for example, looks like a recommendation of homosexuality. That break in the natural order tempts chaos; chaos invites panic. Which is why conservatives fight by any means necessary to make the world look the way they insist it must look, while liberals are busy playing fair. And which is why it is now more accurate to say, as Eric Alterman, The Nation columnist and MSNBC.com blogger, does, that even as it “so perfectly contradicts conventional wisdom . . . the bias of the American media is more conservative than liberal.” They fight the media war ruthlessly, and they are winning.

How have they done it? One way is by lying. James Baker convinced the press of the Democrats’ “unending legal wrangling” in the Florida recount fiasco of 2000 before the Democrats had filed a single lawsuit (the Republicans had filed all of them). Another way is by cheating. When Charles Murray’s Losing Ground was published in 1984, conservative backers paid pundits up to $1,500 each to attend a weekend seminar where Murray massaged them with his argument that federal antipoverty programs increased poverty — a claim that, once scholars had time to examine it but after all the fulsome columns were written, proved to be nonsense. (The same process repeated itself when Murray’s The Bell Curve was published ten years later.) And they’ve won by propounding a Big Lie — the kind that, simply by getting repeated so often, feels so true that those who claim it false look like wreckers and lunatics. “There are certain facts of life so long obvious they would seem beyond dispute,” it runs. “One of these is that there is a left-wing tilt in the media.”

Alterman says that’s dead wrong. For many, that will seem an amazing claim to make. But even more amazing is the evidence he adduces to prove that liberals don’t run the media: he quotes conservatives admitting it. “I’ve gotten balanced coverage,” Patrick Buchanan said of his 1996 presidential campaign, “and broad coverage — all we could have asked. For heaven’s sakes, we kid about the ‘liberal media,’ but every Republican on earth does that.” The conservative press, Republican über-activist Grover Norquist points out, unlike the so-called liberal media (Alterman fliply refers to them throughout as the “SCLM”), “is self-consciously conservative and self-consciously part of the team.” Like any classic Big Lie, the one about the so-called liberal media is based on strategic calculation: calling the media liberal works. I don’t think any conservatives would try to argue that the media have become more liberal in the last decade or so; yet Alterman cites one recent study that found a “fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in the news” compared to twelve years ago. But only the most foolish conservatives would attempt to argue that this finding reflects an objective increase in media liberalism in the intervening years.

The test of any case involving measurement of ideological influence is how that influence affects those in the center — for the people who aren’t already on the extremes are the ones who move most when the balance tips. And to be sure, a figure like Ann Coulter is burned mercilessly in What Liberal Media? What Alterman refers to as her “Tourette’s outbursts” — Coulter has a compulsion to call for liberals’ deaths — should be enough to discredit her; he also provides a handy online appendix (see WhatLiberal Media.com) cataloging the ungodly train of errors in her book Slander. Same with Bernard Goldberg. Alterman reminds us that Goldberg’s claim that only conservatives are condescendingly identified as ideologues on network TV (“conservative judge Robert Bork,” as opposed to “Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe”) has been statistically disproved more than once, though it’s still treated as gospel. And there is a thick, fine chapter on “The (Really) Conservative Media,” detailing the extent to which self-consciously conservative organs alone represent a sizable chunk of our media firmament. But Alterman’s real flames are reserved for the way moderate journalists, some of whom sometimes even get pigeonholed as liberals, have adjusted their professional standards to get conservatives taken seriously. Sweat, Howard Kurtz: your fawning profiles of conservative lights like Andrew Sullivan, Sean Hannity, and Bill Kristol earn you deserved comparison to the writers at Tiger Beat magazine. Kindly turn in your deanship, David Broder: your constitutional antipathy for the alleged disruptiveness of the left is rarely matched in your assessments of the right. Gray Lady, some things are not fit to print — like when you reported that Ken Lay slept in the Lincoln Bedroom as a guest of President Clinton after the claim appeared, unsourced and untrue, on the Drudge Report.

Alterman’s research, really, is excellent; his unique contribution to this debate is his dedicated trawling of transcripts for those moments when pundits reveal their inane prejudices during the endless stretches of air they have to fill on cable TV. (In a section on how journalists allowed their personal antipathy to shockingly bias their political coverage of Al Gore, he catches a 1999 Chris Matthews logorrhea on the subject of Gore’s three-button suit: “Is there some hidden Freudian deal here or what? I don’t know, I mean, Navy guys used to have buttons on their pants. I don’t know what it means.”) It’s stunning to revisit the vitriol of the powerful Michael Kelly on the subject of Bill Clinton, the caving of journalists before the Bush administration during the War on Terrorism (Cokie Roberts of SCLM standby NPR on the subject of Donald Rumsfeld: “[I’m] a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff, and they say it’s true and I’m ready to believe it”), and the systematic collapse of journalistic probity during the high-tech economic boom times of the late nineties. MARKETS SURGE AS LABOR COSTS STAY IN CHECK, ran one front-page New York Times headline on April 30, 1997 — which would be the way the propagandists in George Orwell’s 1984 might translate the phrase “The Rich Got Richer While Poor Got Poorer.”

It’s even more stunning — an argument clincher, in fact — to read what Republicans were saying in the run-up to Election Day 2000: they acknowledged plans, if Bush won the popular vote and Gore won the electoral college, to fight the outcome to the point of rendering Gore’s presidency illegitimate in the eyes of the public. (Chris Matthews endorsed this with the backassward presumption that, “Knowing him as we do,” Gore “may have no problem taking the presidential oath after losing the popular vote.”) After Election Day, the press bent over backward to treat Bush like the president-elect when he wasn’t, and savaged Al Gore for not conceding the “fact” outright. Alterman even quotes self-described liberal pundits Richard Cohen and Al Hunt making the astonishing argument that everyone should be happy at Bush’s election, because “Bush would be better at . . . restraining the GOP Dobermans.” An acknowledgment, in other words, that a whip-sawing Republican tail deserves to wag the majoritarian dog. History, looking at the 2000 election, will not treat this profession kindly.

Much of this isn’t new — he leans often on work by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Salon’s Eric Boehlert, and tips his hat frequently to contributors to these pages; he also borrows often from his own Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy. All the same it’s great having all this stuff rounded up in one place.

There are flaws: the production feels a bit hasty (he reports on events that happened only six weeks before I received the galleys, a remarkably fast turnaround), he’s nasty in an ad hominem way to those on the left he disagrees with, he occasionally calls the kettle black (shortly before a chapter entitled “You’re Only As Liberal As The Man Who Owns You,” he identifies himself as an “independent” Weblogger for General Electric’s MSNBC.com). Alterman’s style is a little grating. There’s lots of throat-clearing and digressing, and he betrays a smarmily knowing insider’s tone, referring throughout to what “no one believes” and what “we all know” — excluding, implicitly, those who don’t think like media types, the people whom it should be precisely part of the task of this book to try to understand. And here we get to the biggest problem of the book. The fact of the matter is that vast majorities of Americans don’t trust the media, that their dominant explanation as to why has to do with its so-called liberalism, and that such antipathy, though accelerated of late, certainly predates conservative movement attempts to exploit it. Why? Alterman doesn’t venture any ideas.

History would help. Though a historian himself (we all should look forward to his forthcoming book When Presidents Lie: Deception and Its Consequences, based on his Stanford dissertation), there’s none of it here. That hampers Alterman. At key points, he acknowledges the essential soundness of part of the conservatives’ argument: that there indeed exists a profoundly felt, and widespread, feeling of division between the cosmopolitan professionals of the media and what was messily but usefully labeled in 2000 America’s “red states” — especially so on the softer issues, the cultural issues. Bill O’Reilly may indeed talk like “an ignorant drunk.” But an analytical question Alterman ignores is why he’s so damned popular. Coordinated conservative strategy is certainly not enough to explain it. For the image of the liberal media has stuck, partly, Alterman says, because of conservatives’ ceaseless bruiting of the charge; but it also has stuck because so many Americans never needed any prompting to perceive media denizens as brie-eaters, indifferent to culturally conservative values. This baseline middle-American distrust of the media that Alterman at key points forces himself to concede is hardly just a creation of conservative propaganda. The fact is that figures like O’Reilly have been a structural component of our civic life at least since 1968 — when a cultural resentment long and obscure in the gestation finally popped its chrysalis and took wing.

That was the year, at the height of the Vietnam War, that the Democrats held their national convention in Chicago, a makeshift band of left-wing protesters came to disrupt it — and the convention site was ringed by an unscalable barbed-wire fence, to be electrified, in case of emergency, at the flick of a switch. Perhaps a tenth of the protesters in their designated sites far from that hall were beaten by the rampaging Chicago police. That is well remembered. What is less well remembered is that one in five of the reporters and cameramen covering the event were sent to the hospital. At the convention site, Mike Wallace was socked in the jaw. There came a moment of extraordinary professional solidarity from the sachems of journalism in response. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Katharine Graham, Otis Chandler, executives from all three networks, and the editor in chief of Time jointly dispatched an unprecedented telegram to Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of streetside censorship of a story “the American public as a whole has a right to know about.”

Their response seemed to them merely common sense, a rallying point: they, after all, not Mr. Daley, were the trained, trusted experts on public opinion in this country. The police riot was clearly a travesty. “These,” Tom Wicker wrote, “were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up.” Who could disagree?

The guardians of public opinion were mistaken in their every assumption. For America did not see Chicago as Tom Wicker did; it saw it as Mayor Daley did. The bumper stickers showed it even before the polls: “We Support Mayor Daley and His Police.”

Huge majorities blamed the protesters for their own fate, though many also blamed the media — CBS received thousands of calls accusing them of hiring cops to beat up the kids. Newsies suddenly awoke to find themselves hated the way bosses were hated. And the media’s inward, anguished, bending over backward to not appear liberal, which Alterman describes so effectively in the present day, was born. Not untypical was The Washington Post’s retrospectively exonerating the police, allowing that, “of course” policemen should be agitated by (no kidding) men in beards. Richard Nixon rode resentment of the media all the way to the White House that year; and, in 1972, to the greatest landslide in American electoral history (the conservative Nixon aide William Safire rode the media penitence all the way to the op-ed page of The New York Times.) A die was cast; conditions were set. The SCLM had been established in many Americans’ minds. What this generation’s ruthless conservatives were able to do was exploit that organic, if diffuse, mood; to make it stick long after it made any conceivable sense if it ever did.

And that’s where Alterman picks up the story: he surveys the damage. Like the news itself, What Liberal Media? is decidedly a first draft of a necessarily deeper inquiry into the whys and wherefores of a development central to understanding our politics over the last three-and-a-half decades. And that’s just fine, because when it comes to the present, Eric Alterman does a hell of a job taking the argument to a whole new level.

Henry Farrell: Huckmentum

Crooked Timber » » Huckmentum: (1) Part 1 of the case against Huckabee winning is that he’s self evidently clueless about international politics, and has bizarre ideas about domestic politics. But does this really hurt him with a Republican base which has been primed for decades to believe that book-larning and expertise are the tools of Evil Coastal Elites. Attacks on his lack of savoir-faire seem to roll off, or perhaps even to make his supporters more enthusiastic. Case in point: his ‘negative advertising without negative advertising’ press conference, which was widely portrayed by media elites as having cooked his goose, but which doesn’t seem to have hurt him one bit.

(2) Part 2 of the case against is that Huckabee doesn’t have any sort of real organization. His decisive win in Iowa demonstrates that he doesn’t need one, at least in states that have a strong evangelical movement. He can rely on the pastors getting out the vote for him. This is one that I’m pretty convinced of – he’s demonstrated that much of the conventional wisdom on the need for organization was wrong. Think of this as the evangelical’s revenge on mainstream Republicans. Much of Karl Rove’s success in 2004 depended on using below-the-radar forms of organization in churches etc to get the vote out. This has created an infrastructure that Huckabee seems to be taking over in the absence of any other real evangelical candidate.

(3) Part 3 of the case against is that Huckabee has little appeal beyond the evangelical movement, and that on its own can’t swing it. This seems true on the basis of Iowa – more than 80% of Huckabee voters in entrance polls were self-professed evangelicals. But while this is the strongest element of the case against Huckabee, it may not be determinative. First, if turnout for primary-type events continues to be depressed, it’s highly plausible that evangelicals (who have their candidate and their cause) are going to be more likely to turn up than other Republican voters, giving Huckabee an advantage in states where the evangelicals can plausibly swing it. Second, it doesn’t look as though Romney, McCain or Giuliani are going to pull out any time soon, splitting the non-evangelical vote three ways (or four, if Thompson stays in too) for a while. Third, as noted in an update to my previous post, Phil Klinkner argues that Huckabee has an in-built edge because the Republican convention awards lots of bonus delegates to states that support Republican candidates, meaning that the South (with its evangelicals) has disproportionate clout. This seems an extremely stupid policy for a party that wants to expand its appeal, but there you go.

(4) Part 4 of the case against is that Huckabee doesn’t have much money to advertise on TV. But he may be able to raise it in short order (again, evangelicals have excellent fundraising networks), and furthermore, he may not need TV advertising in the primaries as much as conventional candidates. His core voters (a) aren’t likely to change their minds about supporting him easily, and (b) are likely to turn out regardless of people saying mean things on the TV.

This is all, as noted above, irresponsible speculation. It may well be that the numbers make it impossible for a candidate whose main base of support is evangelicals to win the primaries. But I haven’t seen any study so far that really demonstrates this (I’d like to see it if there is one). Please raise objections to any and all of the above claims in comments, or raise new issues as appropriate.

Jessica Valenti: Huckabee's Daddy State? No Thanks

Passing Through: Firstly, I just want to thank The Nation for giving me the opportunity to guest blog. I've been reading the magazine since I was a teenager – obsessing over Katha Pollitt's columns much in the same way that other girls were swooning over their Teen Beats. (Though I never got my Katha pull-out, very disappointing.)

Since a lot of my feminism started here, I figured what better way to start my guest-blogging stint than to point out a bit of a sexist election trend.

We all know about the waxing misogynist over Hillary's hair or "cackle," and Chris Matthews' ability to insult women in the most ridiculous ways while keeping a straight face. But what I'm finding most interesting is the perpetual paternalism that's been driving the Republican candidates as of late.

In an interview with People magazine, Bush spoke about his daughter Jenna's engagement – specifically about how Henry Hager "asked for her hand."

"He kind of sidled up to me and said, ‘Can I come and see you?' We were sitting outside the presidential cabin here, and he professed his love for Jenna and said, would I mind if he married her? And I said, ‘Got a deal.' [Laughter] And I'm of the school, once you make the sale, move on. But he had some other points he wanted [to make]. He wanted to talk about how he would be financially responsible." I suppose it doesn't really shock me that Bush would think about his daughter's engagement as a "deal" or "sale," but it did make me think about how – even at a time where women's votes could make or break candidates – the Republican hopefuls seem hell-bent on making little girls of all women.

And no one screams Daddy State more than Mike Huckabee. Whether it's feeling the need to weigh in on Nickelodeon teen celebrity Jamie Lynn Spears' pregnancy ("…she's going to have the child and…that is the right decision") or making condescending remarks about women's ability to understand their own decisions--Papa Huckabee is on one heck of a sexist roll.

Just this past weekend Huckabee said, "I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that's why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor...I think you don't punish the woman, first of all, because it's not about ... I consider her a victim, not a criminal."

Now, you have to love that Huckabee assumes abortion providers are men (I suppose that makes it easier to paint them as taking advantage of poor widdle women), but even worse is the assumption that women don't realize that when they get an abortion, they're getting an abortion.

And he's not alone. When asked about criminalizing abortion, almost all the Republican candidates scoff at the idea of punishing the women themselves--instead preferring to talk about how we've been victimized by doctors. Women, it seems, need to be protected from our own decisions. (Better to leave that to the menfolk.)

While the choice issue may be the easiest way for the candidates to flex their Daddy muscles, I have a feeling that when push comes to shove, none of the Republicans running will have a problem making other decisions for American women as well. So call me crazy, but I'd like a president who thinks of me as, well...an adult. Capable of making decisions. (But what do I know...I'm just a girl.)

Tim Burke: Competency as a Cultural Value

Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » Competency as a Cultural Value: Competency as a Cultural Value Earlier this week on NPR, I heard a man-on-the-street segment about the current election cycle featuring three Southern women, two Texans, one a former New Orleans resident who left after Katrina.

The first woman is an assistant manager in a store somewhere in Texas. She sounded bone-weary about both politics and life. When the interviewer asked what national issues she followed most, she said that she just keeps her head down and tries to keep her family afloat, that all that stuff is beyond her. But when she was asked a bit later about what she’d find attractive about a presidential candidate, she very forcefully turned to the issue of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants, she said, are what has made it difficult for Americans like herself to access welfare and health care. The interviewer pointed out that illegal immigrants usually don’t make use of welfare or unemployment compensation, but the woman shrugged that off. Her resentments were deeper: she sees people that she’s sure are illegal immigrants driving by in nice cars and they seem far better off than she is. She’s struggling just to keep afloat, she’s had to give up health insurance for her children because it’s unaffordable. Her answer to the mystery of how people around her seem better off is that government has something to do with it but in a deep and enigmatic way, and that she’s looking for the candidate who will admit to it, who will mirror her structure of feeling, long before she’s looking for some highly concretized solution.

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In the early 1990s in Zimbabwe, one part of my research concerned how the visible ownership of commodities performed or communicated wealth, and therefore aroused the dangerous jealousies of neighbors. This is a different kind of “mystery of capital” than what Hernando de Soto discusses. I am completely sympathetic to how southern Africans invoke ideas about witchcraft to explain how some people obtain wealth. Obviously it isn’t my own explanation, but there’s a sense in which it’s a completely reasonable attempt to connect the visible surface of material and economic life with the largely invisible mechanisms that move resources and capital around beneath the surface. How did your neighbor get a hold of bricks to complete one wall of his township house when you can’t get any? Where did the family next door get those new shoes, when you know that they don’t have any more access to wage earnings than you do? How did that man keep his job when you lost yours?

One story struck me as particularly potent. I was curious about zvidhoma, spirit beings who are basically the same as the tokoloshe that South Africans talk about. They’re said to be the tools of witches, able to exact invisible revenge on their victims by beating, wounding or causing illness in their targets. But on a number of occasions, I was also told cautionary tales about why you should never pick up what seems to be abandoned or unowned wealth or goods (like a bag of money or a wandering goat) because often these will have zvidhoma “stuck” to them who will then infest the unlucky soul who picks them up. Money and wealth circulate mysteriously, and carry hidden dangers. The people who get rich, in this worldview, are those who’ve learned to manage malevolent spiritual powers. If you’re not one of those people, you’ll just end up a victim if you chase after phantoms.

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I’ve written before in my blog about how “blue state” elites in the United States continue to walk into the trap of blandly assuming that competency, skill and experience are sufficient and universally appealing attributes for a political candidate in national elections, as long as that candidate also has generally liberal views. Following the Iowa caucuses, I’m returning to this theme, because it’s one claim that seems to rub a lot of my readers the wrong way and I’m desperately hoping that this time, the message gets across to Democratic voters.

That woman in Texas is probably not a Democratic voter regardless of whom the candidate is. Her key issue maybe ought to be health care reform, but she’s enmeshed in another kind of narrative, one where racial resentment, among other things, is lurking very powerfully just underneath the surface. But even that is a layer covering the real depths. What I heard listening to her was someone who basically thinks that she’s in a hopeless place because some great engine is churning mysteriously in the depths of history, that life is just bad now. The other Texan on the segment talked about a completely different issue, changes to family life and the status of women, but there was some of the same declensionist mood in her remarks. Families and women are just different than when she was young, she said, and she’s mighty concerned about it all.

Educated liberals have a lot of quick answers to these kinds of statements: they’re factually wrong, they’re unfair, they’re reactionary. All true. But those rejoinders don’t get to the heart of what’s being said: that life is changing, that the changes are mysterious, that power lies somewhere far away from where the speaker exists, and that they don’t believe that there’s much to be done about it. They despair at the way the world and their corner of the world is nevertheless.

I loathe the resentment machine that is built into this structure of feeling, I hate its imperviousness to any persuasion or any evidence or anything outside of itself. When I talk to my mother-in-law, I often get a clear view of its workings, and the role that mass culture (including the mainstream media) play in providing fresh narrative hooks and telling incidentals to its churnings. In the last two years, for example, every time I talk to her, she wants to return to the story of Ward Churchill. Or she wants to talk about how terrible crime is. Or about the problem of illegal immigrants. And so on. These are immobile, self-reproducing, stories. Their truth in her mind is guaranteed by something far outside the actualities and realities that compose any given incident or issue.

But the thing of it is, in some measure, many ordinary Americans are not wrong to think that some of what afflicts or haunts their everyday lives is happening on scales of time and change and causality that aren’t reducible to the kinds of neat policy packages and governmental initiatives and ten-point plans that highly competent, experienced, meritorious political candidates tend to showcase. Like southern Africans, many ordinary Americans may invoke vague and metaphysical ideas about conspiratorial action and sinister agency to explain those larger transformations, but the basic take-away (as in southern Africa) is often: we’re fucked.

Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. Yes, of course one of the things that makes me furious is that many Republican political leaders are exempted from this suspicion when in fact they ought to be the faces on the wanted poster, but that has something to do with the extent to which the Republican leadership since Reagan has largely avoided selling itself as the party of superior competency in policy-making, but instead as the party that can address the deeper spiritual condition of the nation, change the movement of the geist.

It’s too easy to just write this reading of the world off as false consciousness, as many liberals and leftists do in various ways, despite the fact that it is false in many of its particulars, partial in many of its manifestations, hypocritical and vicious in some of the ways it’s voiced and acted upon. It’s too easy because it’s also true.

There isn’t a policy package that can straightforwardly address some of the underlying structural changes in the global political economy that affect Peoria as surely as they affect Shenzen. Your wonkish arms are too short to box with that god. I don’t think anyone is the master of these changes, even though some people and social classes and systems have way more power to direct what is happening than others. Even corporations and governments, bankers and businessmen, technologists and artisans, are sometimes adrift on a swiftly floating river, bound to follow it to its coursing ends.

There isn’t a plan that can respond to how it feels to come to maturity within one structure of feeling and being in the world, the workplace, the home, your body and then wake one day like Gregor Samsa and find out that all those things are something utterly different than what they once were. My paternal grandparents lived in a little neighborhood in Los Angeles that was mostly white when they moved in, significantly latino when they grew old, and mostly southeast Asian when they died. It’s easy for me to be the cosmopolitan that I am and say that they should have cherished that change, recognized it for the profoundly beautiful and American thing that it was. I live in a world where that kind of pluralism means new things to teach and read, new cuisines to sample, new experiences and histories to enrich my community and my classroom. Because I live in a world where I have the tools to master and manage that kind of change. They lived in a world where that change meant that they’d go to the stores down the street and not be able to read any of the signs nor understand any of the conversations around them in the bank, the grocery store and the post office. I was taught to aestheticize and make use of difference. They weren’t.

In other contexts, humanistic intellectuals are perfectly well aware of this aspect of contemporary life. If we’re talking about local cultures in the developing world, we’re savvy. If we’re trying to define and grapple with the concept of modernity, we get the picture. Yes, sometimes we have our own kinds of passion plays, our own hinted outlines of a mystery clockwork churning in the depth of history, our own conspiratorial readings. Some of which aren’t wrong: there are bad people in the world who work busily to create or preserve outcomes at both big and small scales that benefit themselves and harm others. (Just as southern Africans are right: some of the powerful are witches, if by that we mean people who illicitly manipulate invisible and hidden forces to produce selfish gains for themselves at the expense of everyone else.)

Competency is something I value. I believe in it, I vote for it. It is what makes a leader (institutional, national, local) both legitimate and charismatic in my eyes. But that’s significantly because I inhabit social and economic worlds where competency has a very immediate and obvious impact on whether those worlds function well or not. I can see what happens when people like Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove are allowed to suborn the Department of Justice to narrowly self-interested, short-term political ends. I can see what happens when the power of the national executive becomes both unconstrained and arbitrary. I can see what happens when hacks are given the steering wheels of foreign policy.

That sight is partly a function of knowledge, which I still believe can have a universal value to everyone, at all levels. But it’s also self-interest. I am drawn to procedural liberalism because I live in worlds that are highly procedural and my skills and training are adapted to manipulating procedural outcomes. I think the trashing of the Department of Justice is bad for all Americans, but the fact is, I also am aware that it’s likely to be particularly bad for me and people like me. People with money, education, and a familiarity with the procedural world of law and government can navigate the legal system if need be, but only as long as it is a system where its declared aspirations for fairness and political neutrality at least vaguely match its practices, where the people who work the system have some kind of internalized commitment to those values. The more a system like that becomes transparent to short-term i