As the midterm elections approach, the political topic on everyone's tongue is jobs. The discussion in the popular press, such as it is, takes several forms. Lately, the most common question one hears is how come the economy in general seems to be recovering from the recession (this was true until just a week or so ago) but the unemployment rate is so stubbornly high? The fact that corporate profits are high has also been mentioned repeatedly since itg was first introduced about a month ago: $1.8 trillion the larger corporations are sitting on (that's the number being endlessly repeated, without evidence that it is accurate, by the way), but they're not spending it, and hence not hiring--why?
Several kinds of explanations have been adduced for the discrepancy between supposedly incipient recovery and the unemployment rate of over 9.5%. One, which Republicans favor, is that the investment environment is very uncertain because of Obama Administration policies. Business planners don't know the real costs of the health care bill; they know the bill will cause them to have higher costs but they don't know how much higher. They universally deny that the bill could possibly be revenue neutral even for the government, and they are correct, since most of the things that have to happen to make it revenue depend on action Congress has yet to take, and almost certainly never will because it requires courage; but they are certain it will add to costs in the private economy. They don't know if some sort of carbon tax, whether cap-and-trade in structure or not, will pass Congress in the next year or two. That would also add to the cost of doing business. And financial markets remain unstable, and with the new financial regulations bill, too, more uncertainly is added to the mix. Some companies are holding companies that own banks, and until they see how banks figure out how to apply the Volcker Rule, they can't calculate what their overall portfolio looks like. Uncertainty breeds hesitation, and companies want to hang on to cash in uncertain times.
Another explanation, not necessarily contradictory of the first, is that economists underestimated the impact of public sectors layoffs. I think this is true; indeed, I implored one my authors, Desmond Lackman, to take it more seriously when he was preparing his excellent article on the coming double dip. And he did. But a lot of economic analysts who focus on national-level statistics did not realize how broke most of the state and counties were, and how little the so-called stimulus bill made a dent in their circumstances. The layoffs have been huge, and have offset hiring in some other sectors, including manufacturing.
These explanations are at best partial, however, because they are superficial. There's a lot more going on than this, and while I used to be reluctant to voice my views on this kind of thing, my not being an economist and all, I have lost a lot of my reluctance since it has become obvious that most economists don't know what they're talking about. Besides, this is just a blog, and it's August...
First, it is already obviou--has been for a long time--that this is not a "V" recession but more like a "U" or "L" recession: Many jobs that existed when all this started are not coming back. The industries in which they existed have either died or retooled. We have witnessed a massive substitution of new capital for labor in productive processes in recent years, and a lot of this has had to do with IT-related inputs. We have exported a lot of jobs, yes, some of that made possible by the death-of-distance phenomenon made possible by IT. We have allowed a lot of illegals to be hired, too. But most of all we have exported jobs to ourselves as teched-up consumers--think when you last had to deal with a bank teller, a gas pumper, a typist at an office, a telephone receptionist, even a grocery store checkout clerk.
It does not take a rocket scientist, or even an economist, to see that productivity increases are predicated on this capital-for-labor substitution, which has accelerated sharply because of the shake-up of the past two years. One of the reasons, of course, is that the cost of labor has gone up sharply as health care costs and related benefits have gone up--another reason why it is tragic that the so-called health care bill isn't a health care bill at all--just an insurance bill, that did nothing whatsoever to understand and get a grip on cost escalation. (TAI has also focused on that, and we have the best essay anywhere on the basics.) And this process of substitution is going on not only in the United States, but practically everywhere, including China and the Asian rimlands. This more than anything else explains how economic activity can become increasingly decoupled from employment figures.
Also,just by the way, there is a strong likelihood that the numbers we're using are inaccurate, but that's another matter. The way we collect these numbers embeds certain biases in the figures, as Ryan Streeter pointed out in TAI several issues ago. Most likely unemployment is even higher than we think on some counts, and not just because we don't count people who have stopped looking. But unemployment lower on others as people try to avoid taxes by moving into cash or barter economics. I am not talking about rich people, who always try to avoid or evade taxes if they can (and they often can). I am talking about people in service economics mostly who feel squeezed and to keep ends meeting have to shave expenses. They can do this by going off book, and I think we vastly underestimate how many people do this as a natural course of behavior. Lower middle class tax avoidance by this method is perfectly natural and in a sense fair, except that it burdens middle-class salary makers disproportionately. So what's new? How does it balance out, between our underestimation and our overestimation? Is 9.5% right, or is it closer to 8%, or 13%. I don't know; it would make for a terrific research project for those with the means -- maybe a Nobel in economics awaits.
The Democrats, it will be recalled, rolled out a few weeks ago a so-called manufacturing initiative. This was two parts hilarious, two parts pathetic and one part just stupid. The so-called initiative really wasn't; it just mainly renamed some other programs already out there for other reasons. They apparently thought voters would be too stupid or lazy to notice, and of course that's right. So now they can claim an initiative, which doesn't exist. This initiative's main element is to tax companies that export jobs. How that encourages new start-ups or actually helps revive manufacturing is a little hard to see. What these nitwits seem not to get, too, as Charles Davidson, TAI's publisher was quick to notice, is that any initiative that promotes a renewal of manufacturing is, under present conditions, going to accelerate the substitution of capital for labor and thus lead to a future with even fewer good jobs. So is it a good thing, then, that the Democrats' initiative is a sham? Not exactly, and now we come to the gist of the matter.
We have a structural problem with the economy (structural as opposed to cyclical in econ-speak), and with the labor profile that goes with it. This is the word -- structural -- you now hear a lot, a word I was using regularly to describe the situation at least 18 months ago. Of course this refers to a rapid shift in the labor profile as new investment becomes sharply more capital intensive and as global trends continue to send shock waves against national economies, including even very large ones like our own.
But the structural problem goes deeper than that. Here is what else is going on that contributes to the current structural situation. Americans are saving more, which is good. This leads to lower aggregate demand, which is also good if you care about the environment, bad if you care about the speed with which money moves to stimulate spending. Ah, but Edmund Phelps understands that what lower aggregate demand means is a whole lot less than it's cracked up to mean. He at least remembers Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian wise guy who substituted the concept of preferences for the older idea of utility. The Keynsian macro-economists have it wrong; people don't make choices just on the basis of rational value-added calculations. The micro approach that emphasizes preferences has it right, and right now Americans are in a new mood. Some, at least, are asking why they've been buying bunches of junk they don't need. Some are concerned about hyper-consumerism on the environment, if not also on their own mortal souls. It's about time. In short, I suspect that a cultural shift underlies the co-called weakness of "consumer confidence", which is a total misnomer for what is happening. It's not just that a lot of people are worried about overextending themselves, though that is part of it for many, it's that increasing numbers of marginally more intelligence people are re-thinking their styles of living, their priorities, what makes them happy and satisfied. Partly this is a generational change. A lot of people don't lack confidence; they're just not as foolish with their time and money as they used to be. When Time magazine, or all things, runs a cover story on "The End of Excess", which it did last year, you know something is cooking.
If this is true, it means we cannot go on, or at any rate seem not likely to go on, as we have constantly generating artificial demand without end. We cannot forever invent pointless new gadgets--we really need a new razor with 6 blades instead of "just" 5, don't we?--and throw billions of slick advertising dollars at them to sustain the economy on an upward tilt forever. And let me not leave this point too soon: science-based corporate advertising represents a kind of Weapon of Mass Deception (WMD, yes....). Do you realize that when a TV ad for some hot car shows you a sleek black vehicle with a hot blonde standing over it, saying "I love my whatever-it-is", that dopamine actually flows into your nucleus accumbens? The association between the sex object and the car for sale established by the ad image actually changes the neurotransmission sequences in your brain. The images create those pathways, and there is not a thing you can do about it, because human beings did not evolve over hundreds of millions of years under conditions in which their visual field included mediated images (as opposed to real ones) that could be rigged to deceive them. We have no natural defenses against such deliberate uses of neurochemisty to harvest us as consumers, anymore than Pavlov's dogs were capable of outsmarting Pavlov and screwing up his operent conditioning experiments. Man, would people really get angry if they knew this.....
Well guess what? People are figuring it out. And for that any other reasons it is going to get harder for corporations to sell people lots of crap they don't need. I think we may be coming to a point, ever so slowly to be sure, where the value-added content of new products is going to have to be persuasive in a way it has not been heretofore in order to get large numbers of people to buy them. I think, I hope anyway, that people's idea of what is and is not a "bargain" is finally starting to change, by which I mean to heal from the fetish-like sickness in which it has rested for about the past half century. (TAI reviewed a recent book by that name recently--I commend it to you.)
What this means is that economic growth beyond what population increase implies is going to depend increasingly on invention, innovation and that, in turn, depends on supporting entrepreneurial activity. That's what the Administration does not seem to understand, though it has gotten the same advice from just about everyone with a brain. But there are fewer people with a business background in the Obama Administration than any in American history. These guys are on balance hostile to business. The stimulus was just for union constituencies involved in old, shovel-ready projects. This was a stupid way to spend that money, and there is still zero sign that these guys know where new jobs come from. They come from high-tech start-ups and smaller businesses, which in turn thrive in investment-friendly conditions. The Obama Administration's bigger-government, higher-taxes approach to everything points in exactly the wrong direction, of course. They say they understand this, of course. Sometimes I think the President actually does understand it at some level. But where's the action? Where are the genuine initiatives? This is what comes of ceding authority to people like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi (not that most Republicans have shown any great acumen here either).
Truth be told, what we're witnessing now has been a long time in the making. It has a history. About 50, 60 years ago a lot of observers predicted that because of automation we'd eventually end up with overproduction, deflationary danger and structural unemployment. A lot also predicted that this was how the Cold War would end--through convergence forced by technology. We'd have a situation where less than half the work force would produce all anyone wanted or needed, and we'd have to figure out what the rest of the population would do to get its share of the goodies. If they did not have salaries because their labor was superfluous, how were they to live? What would they do, and how would they earn money? You can see where this is going, or seemed then to be going: The government would have to distribute the goodies. We would not necessarily have to collectivize the means of production, but we would have to collectivize the means of distribution. That's what a welfare state is to some extent, but these observers were talking about countercyclical policies much bolder than those of the welfare state.
This problem is essentially the same one Bismarck recognized in the middle of the 19th century. It's where his proto-socialist ideas of social inclusion came from, because he was worried about alienation and revolt. What these worriers did not see was that new technology could produce whole new industries that produced more good new jobs than the old machines took a way. It was dynamic and unsettling, but standards of living could rise fast.
When it dawned on people that this seemed in fact to be happening as the 19th century rolled on into the 20th, and that automation was not producing unemployment but growth and new structures of economic supply and demand, other questions arose. What about education? As the jobs got more technically demanding, wouldn't people have to know more? Herbert A. Simon took up this question in a 1964 book (The Shape of Automation) and concluded not really. He estimated that even if the share of capital in the economy as a whole increased by 3% a year, a workforce educated on the level of Japan or Western Europe, at the time lower on average than the U.S. levels, would be fine.
Simon was right for a while and those who feared the downstream impact of automation wrong, but I doubt he still is right, and I wonder sometimes whether the automation Cassandras were not so much wrong as premature. I think Simon may have underestimated the compound impact of IT-related value-added processes. I think we might be reaching limits here, and this is where our real problem comes into play -- this is what "structural" really means in practice.
I think the substitution of capital for labor is accelerating rapidly, and I think IT is largely responsible for the current wave of substitution--and it has a generic and generative impact other technologies have not had. It's not like a machine but like a machine tool. I think too we may well be moving into a situation, in a global scale, where comparative advantage is leaving high-wage jobs permanently scarce in the United States. If manufacturing at nearly all levels can move, largely thanks to IT, to find its level of highest sustainable profit, it will. Not that profit margins alone motivate employers. They, too, factor in all sorts of other considerations, like stability, community quality of life and so on, just as consumers do. They will pay higher wages in order to keep cadres of workers who know each other and perform well in teams. On balance, however, nearly everything can move now -- except maybe roofing.....--and it will, possibly until all the world's relative labor costs even out. And since there are still 800 million poor people in China, that's going to take quite a while. Either that, or the world will become sharply nationalist-protectionist as dispossessed citizens try to stop the global juggernaut, which could happen and which, under certain circumstances, would be understandable and could even be morally justified under some circumstances (though the thought of what political opportunists could do with such energies is truly horrifying).
It could be, in other words, that we could face a very large, more or less permanent massive unemployment situation -- unless we innovate like mad, and to do that we'll have to educate like mad. And here is the problem there: Pretty soon, for reasons concerning immigration and demography, most of our young people will be from minority groups that have a history of not learning very well. Let us not be coy: The reason for this is not mainly unequal educational opportunities, though there is plenty of that too, no doubt. The reason is cultural, and there is a strict limit to what public policy can do about this. NCLB cannot fix this, but to a limited extent. Kids who are not spoken to and read to at home start school is very inferior positions compared to other kids. A lot of this has to do with family stability, with having a mother and father in the house paying attention to and loving the children. The data on kids in minority groups growing up without fathers is appalling, and it is getting worse, not better. Schools alone can't fix this problem, and it is fast becoming not a humanitarian problem affecting the so-called underclass, as it has been since the Moynihan Report, but a core economic and social problem on a national level.
This is why I am on most days pessimistic not so much about the American economy--which remains capable of innovation and hence extensive growth--but about American society: We are going to have ever huger numbers of essentially unemployable minority citizens, a schizoid society as a result that is even worse than it already is. They won't be able to learn enough to take the higher value-added jobs an innovation-based global economy will generate. They will be competing not just with other Americans, remember, but with a global labor force in many if not most areas. The prospects fills me with dread.
Is there nothing we can do about this? No, in fact, there is plenty we can do. We can solve the problems ahead with structural unemployment, but it will take boldness, imagination and some political courage. Which means it probably won't happen. I think just two major programs would do the trick, at least to start.
The first, which I have written on before, and for years, is that we need a Baby Bond/National Service program. I have described this at length in an earlier post, and so will not repeat it here; TAI has also featured a milder version of this idea in print.
The second is a new Homestead Act. We need to get otherwise unemployable people out of the sinkhole cities in which they live in a spiral of hopelessness. We need to get them back on the land, increasing dramatically the labor-input of agriculture. We need to turn America into one huge environmentally self-sustaining garden, understanding what that word really means. We will solve the problem in American agriculture this way, too; the way we grow food in this country is environmentally unsustainable, unhealthy and utterly corrupt. Americans are obese to the extent they are largely due to the alliance of agribusiness, the fast-food industry and, of course, advertising...... Note too that about 9.1% of all health care expenses in the United States are spent on obese people, who are vastly more likely to be struck by disease than non-obese people. Folks, 9.1% is a very big number as these things go. I love it when I read ad posters on the DC Metro from the corn growers, telling me how efficient they are and isn't that wonderful. Right; all that high fructose corn syrup in nearly every damned processed food product in the store is making us sick. Thanks for being so damned efficient, you hogs.
We need to increase the number of smaller farms and cooperatives by at least 1,000% in a decade. I have a plan for how to do this--a kind of combination Homestead Act, CCC and GI Bill. It definitely can be done. It would stimulate the economy in many ways, teach millions of Americans touch labor skills they need to know, make the country vastly more healthy and help save and sustain our soil.
These two programs, the Baby Bond/National Service program and the New Homestead Act, taken together, can save the country from the disaster of permanent structural high unemployment and social upheaval ahead. Is our political system capable of generating serious change? Can a flock of pigeons perform Beethoven's Fifth?
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
What a morning
It has been more than a month, again, since I posted anything. I would apologize to my regular readers for this lapse, except that there are none--or at any rate, very, very few. I doubt I have disappointed anyone by being so absent from this page, but in case I am mistaken about that, I apologize.
It's not because nothing has happened worth commenting upon, or because I have been unusually thoughtless. Rather, it is a combination of three factors that have kept me away.
First, I have been very busy putting to bed the September-October issue of The American Interest. This issue is always sort of pain because a lot of it has to be done after the academic year is completed, and it is hard to get lots of people to do anything after a certain set of days in May. Also this time we devised a feature on the future of the U.S. armed forces, which locked me into dealing with a series of authors who, with almost no exception, are not particularly good writers (they have other virtues, to be sure, that are arguably a lot more important), who I have never worked with before, and who were generally late with their submissions. It all turned out fine, but it did not leave a lot of leisure time for blogging.
Another reason, however, for ignoring this blog in recent weeks is that I have to confess I had hoped that at least a few colleagues would take to reading it. None have. Indeed, I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that pretty much no one reads anything I write. My book Jewcentricity, published about 10 months ago, has been almost totally ignored--I know of only two short reviews in train, both positive but neither yet published. I published a review of Peter Beinart's new book The Icarus Syndrome in the July 19 issue of National Review (because they asked me to do it and offered money.....) As far as I know, no one has read it, except for maybe the copy-editor over there. Even my publisher seems not to read my essays in The American Interest. He was making all sorts of noises about the futility of the war in Afghanistan the other day, and complaining that the magazine had not pointed out all this. I, as editor, he implied, was responsible for this. I reminded him that we had, too, pointed these things out, most recently in my piece called "Disconnected" in the May-June issue. The magazine over the past five years has run at least a half dozen major pieces on the war and related matters, as well -- all critical of then-present policy. He remembered some of the other essays, I know. But not mine, apparently. He said, in effect, "well, you didn't put your piece on the cover, and you're not famous, so that's why no one reads or remembers what you said." Hard to reply to a remark like that, so I didn't. I guess he's right. That won't persuade me to put my own work on the cover, however.
I am certainly sure some days that I am not only not famous, and that no one reads what I write, but that I am in general doormat material par excellance. Take today.
Today I had to get up very early to make a 7:45 doctor's appointment--just a simple little tryst with my friend Dr. Martin K. to check on how a new blood-pressure medication is working. (It's working well, thank you very much.) But the Ride-On bus broke down just about 200 yards from the Metro. The driver seemed to lose his transmission. He found it again, because the bus got to the platform sooner than many of us did walking away from the breakdown. We just missed a train; those who hung with the bus made it. That's a pisser, ain't it? And it is very muggy today, so that by the time I'd walked that short distance I was already in a sweat--despite my short-sleeve shirt and casual pants. (I only wear a suit and tie in summer when there is some compelling reason to do so.)
Then I found that in addition to blood-pressure tests, I needed to get blood taken to test my potassium and vitamin D levels. Hell if I know what for. "Oh, no"--I say to myself, and here is why: Since changing insurance plans some months ago, I now have to go to a lab, in the same building as the doctor's office, that takes at least an hour just to take a vial of blood--this as against the lab I used to go to where the whole process never took more than ten minutes. And sure enough, the same three slow-witted, slow-moving, dialect-afflicted women managed to waste another whole hour of my time shuffling paper and turning in random circles. It's not just my time they waste, of course, but I can't say I particularly care about what happens to anonymous others, except theoretically. I always have a book with me to read to fill the gap, so the time is not really wasted. But still.....
Eventually I escaped the medical maze and walked back to the Metro, picking it up at Friendship Heights. It's only a four-block walk, but again, because of the humidity, I was re-drenched by the time I get to the Red Line. I took the train to my usual stop, Dupont Circle, and, once again, there were no up-escalators working. This was the case for several days running last month. It is hard to understand how a repetitive and predictable problem like that can go unrepaired for so long, and then recur in almost no time. Today, there was an escalator working, but it had been designated a down escalator. Go figure.
And please understand: We are talking about one of the deepest stations in the whole DC Metro system. There are something like 160 steps from bottom to top when the escalator is frozen, and there are no working elevators on that side of the station either. So some people, older people, obese people (of whom there are shockingly many) have real trouble making it up those steps. It is not good for their cardiac situation. They slow everyone else down, too.
The sheer incompetence of everything about the Ride-On and Metro systems is a wonder to behold. And no one, as far as I can tell, ever gets fired or reprimanded for repeated demonstrations of incompetence. So it continues. This is also the jist of the recent NTSB report on the fatal June 2009 Green Line crash that killed 9 people. Those running the system day to day are poorly educated, present-oriented people with very little sense of responsibility for outcomes, and the system of governance, which is really to blame, lets them persist in it. It's hard to get past the suspicion that Metro is mainly a jobs program for an unfortunately poorly educated minority, and that this is at the bottom of the reason why it is so screwed up. But you're not allowed to say that, because saying it raises accusations that you don't like the minority. Nothing could be further than the truth in my case; what I don't like is the systematic educational disadvantages afflicting this minority, which has a long and complex explanation I have no intention of going into here.
Anyway, so once spewed out of the Dupont Circle exit I go over to the pharmacy to fill my prescription for this blood-pressure medicine. Same people over there except for one new trainee, apparently. The woman who usually takes my script took my script, but instead of taking it to the pharmacist while I begin to wait my ten minutes, she stopped to answer a question from this trainee that inflated itself into several questions, a rant and a harangue taking many minutes to rise and fall. All the while, my script has not made it into the hands of the otherwise idle pharmacist. I did not say anything. Eventually, I got my pills. And then eventually I made it to my office.
And so I considered the morning thus far: I had woken up at about 6:00 am, and now it was 9:30 and I had yet to breakfast. Thank you Ride-On bus system, thank you idiot lab-tech administrators, thank you clueless Metro escalator mechanics, thank you oblivious pharmacy counter clerks. All I can say is that I am deeply thankful that I did not need to make a stop at the bank or the post office. Oh Lord, anything but the post office......
Now for the long-awaited third reason (thought I had forgotten, didn't you?): Blogging is a lot like exercising. If you get out of the habit, it's hard to get back into it. But once you do, you find you have more energy than you imagined possible, for both.
I definitely need to get more exercise, now that the magazine's offices have moved a floor up and I no longer have a shower to use--meaning I cannot commute part way by bike anymore. I did that, from my house in Potomac to the Metro and back, four days a week in the Daylight Savings Time period of the year, for 10 years -- 14 miles roundtrip. It was very good for me, and now I can't do it, because I cannot seem to find a way to replace the shower. All the gyms downtown refuse to let me keep my street cloths locked up over night. They expect people to walk in in their street cloths, change into gym cloths, and change back to leave; what I want to do is just the opposite. The only facilities they have to keep stuff overnight are these tiny wire baskets. They will not make an exception, which they have the physical ability to do. I have asked. I have offered to pay more than regular. They won't do it. The clerks are not paid to make decisions, and they seem not to care: They follow the SOPs to the letter, and their superiors let them. But that leaves me with no option, except maybe to join the Cosmos Club (where I had drinks a few weeks ago with my friend and member Dov Zakheim). But I think I can't afford it, or rather, choose not to afford it
It is clear that if I were famous, not only would people read what I write, but I could get some customized service at the gym. Maybe the elevator at Dupont Circle would always work, too--who knows? If you're going to fantasize, don't pull punches. But I don't know how to get famous (and I am not at all sure I want to). So I suffer or, in Cartesian form: I languish, therefore I am.
But what goes for exercising goes for blogging--that, I think, was my point here. If I just make myself do it more, I'll be able to do it more. That doesn't mean anyone will read it. But so what?
Now that I have wasted your time, dear non-existent reader, with pap and persiflage, you are probably wondering whether I have anything of actual interest to say. Of course I do. Since we're on the subject of incompetence, and incompetence related to infrastructure (buses, trains, health-care system...) in particular, let's stay there for a bit.
We have in The American Interest, as you ought to know if you don't, an ongoing project called "Nation-Building in America" and infrastructure renewal is a subject I have been trying to get covered, to no avail.
To be specific, I have sought for The American Interest an essay on how we should build a 21st century infrastructure for the economic and broadly social good of our country. That, apparently, is where the simple part stops. That is because I define a 21st century infrastructure as an integrated structure that encompasses energy, transportation, communication, airports, water/sanitation and all the rest, bound together by an IT-driven central nervous system. We all know about the “smart grid”, but that’s just about electrical utilities. I am talking about something an order of magnitude above that. I am taking about maximizing the synergies among developing technologies, and I am talking about skipping a technology generation to acquire a truly advanced infrastructure that can serve as real productivity value-added for the economy. It’s not exactly like the opportunity Japan and Germany had after WWII, where the Allies had destroyed their legacy systems, but we’re in such bad shape that it’s almost analogous.
Yet the government seems clueless. The stimulus program was about shovel-ready projects--old technology that it's foolish and wasteful to fix--but of course that that also a jobs programs and little more. The Obama Administration's new investment in railroads is nice, but it's a one-off. It is not integrated into anything, as best I can tell. The President is just jealous that French and Japanese and Chinese trains can go faster than ours. That's what he actually said, in the State of Union address, no less. I waited to hear a vision for infrastructure that was economically sensible and sound in terms of engineering principles. Nothing doing. If this guy is really so smart, why is he consistently so disappointing?
Now, I am not a centralization freak; on the contrary, I am more impressed by the efficiencies of subsidiarity. But there are some public-goods functions that can benefit from technical and engineering synergies, and I think infrastructure in an age of rapid IT advances is one of them. We want an infrastructure that’s efficient in thermodynamic terms, but also desirable in broader social terms, because we know that the choices we make about technology affect social patterns, attitudes and behaviors (think internal combustion engines, highways, suburbs and drive-ins....or think the Pill, for that matter — not all the shaping is spatial in nature). We don’t get integrative efficiencies from dumb luck. They require some planning, some forethought. They also require a capacity to trade short-term for longer-term benefits. Why, for example, do we still keep so many of our power and telecommunications lines up in the air, where they’re vulnerable to every passing windstorm, instead of burying them? Partly because we’re incapable, it seems, much of the time, of front-loading a long-term investment.
Seems to me, too, that if we now need some aspects of this system to be national in scope for the sake of efficiency and rational management (say, the telecommunications piece), then we cannot keep doing on the state level some of the things we’ve always done before. How much sense does it make to have 50 separate licensing schemes when the technology is of national (and international) scale? (Though perhaps there are some functions that would be better de-federalized and given to the states.)
And it seems to me that the principle of modularity needs to be built into a new infrastructure, so that just as newer avionics packages can be put into old airframes (to a point), technological advances can be instituted in infrastructure systems without having to start over every time some component ages. Now we face a mountain of costs because we have let systems age so badly. If they had employed modular designs, we would be able to upgrade without that mountain being so high, and that should be our aim in the future: to use modular design, insofar as possible, to space out our investments, so that maintenance is a form of upgrading, again, insofar as possible.
Moreover, I want this essay to consider what the role of government ought to be to promote (not to own and manage) a new infrastructure. That is what the whole nation-building project is premised on: that if you want genuinely new and better policies leading to better outcomes, you need to consider the design function, because old bureaucracies can rarely do new and different things well, or do them at all.
There are some people I know who argue that government should have zero role in infrastructure, that it all should be privatized. I regard this as an insane remark, but actually, so do most of the people who assert it — because the moment after they got their liberatarian rocks off, so to speak, they acknowledge all the “exceptions” in which some government role was necessary. If you add up all the exceptions, there’s not much ideology left. Any reasonable and historically literate person knows enough of the history of the canals and roads and railroads and telegraph and so on to realize that we need government for a variety of purposes: licensing to ensure health and safety and rational use of scarce public goods, providing an understory market for new technologies, basic science and R&D investments, and so on. There is a logic to some kinds of public monopolies, after all.
The design problem in this regard is that we need a place where the partners and participants involved in building a new infrastructure can convene to decide what to do and how to do it. I have a hard time seeing how people who build electricity grids, people who build road systems, people who build trains and light rail, people who do energy infrastructure, people who do fiber optics, people who plan airports, people who think about financing such things, people who consider safety and environmental issues (one of several necessary governmental functions) and so on, will all somehow get together on their own accord within a private-market framework to plan an integrated system. Without such a place to convene and plan, we will get incremental developments at best, and possibly developments not up to efficient scale. We will get a system that is less than the sum of its parts rather than more. As things stand now, there is no such place in the Federal government, nor is there any interagency arrangement substituting for such a place.
Now, I am mindful that even if a concept for such a place were developed (say, merging the Dept of Transportation, the non-military side of DOE, the FCC and the NTSB) there is a good chance that the U.S. political system, as presently constituted, could not do this right. (Look how the Feds messed up the original DHS proposal to create the dysfunctional monstrosity we have now.) The opportunities for distortion, corruption and God-knows-what are almost too large to imagine. But is that a reason not even to think about it? Moreover, seems to me that the promise of a really major leap forward could attract significant private sector support. Oddly enough, in this economic climate, it may be easier to think and build big than to persuade people to go further into debt to fix already obsolete bridges, rails, roads, water/sanitation systems and so on.
I have explained this project to a few sets of authors in recent months. Some tried and failed because they ignored the governmental piece, after promising me they wouldn't; some did not understand what I wanted to start with. I just don’t see the problem here. I don’t say it’s easy to think practically about this — a writer or team of writers would have to understand both the technical side and how the government works — but this isn’t rocket science. And I am not asking for a book or for the final word: I just am asking someone to start a useful conversation, that’s all. What’s the best infrastructure for our future we can think of, and how do we need to organize ourselves to translate vision into reality? As I said to begin with, simple.
I think I have finally found an author who understands what I want and can do it. We'll see. In the meantime, I went with some optimism to the newly opened offices of Building America's Future (BAF) here in Washington. This is, supposedly, an infrastructure renewal project co-sponsored by Governors Schwarzeneggar, Rendell and Mayor Bloomberg. I told the head of this office, Marcia Hale, that I wanted to help them get out their message. Come to find out, they have no message. They do not have any version of even 2,000, let along 4,000 or 5,000 words they can give me for TAI. So far, it seems, they have only a PR stunt, a minor upper-middle-class jobs project and some rental real estate; they seem to have done no actual thinking at all. If they have, I can find no evidence of it. What a typical Washington escapade. Unkind? Too cynical, you think? Maybe; let's see. So OK, Arnold, Eddie and Michael: Prove me wrong. I dare you.
Mornings like this can peel the paint right off a person's residual optimism.
Well, that's all for now. Come back in days soon to come for commentary on William Graham Sumner, plutocracy, Pakistan, and the scourge of the designated-hitter rule. Promise. And I promise I will not discuss Charlie Rangel and Maxime Waters. Why waste the electrons?
It's not because nothing has happened worth commenting upon, or because I have been unusually thoughtless. Rather, it is a combination of three factors that have kept me away.
First, I have been very busy putting to bed the September-October issue of The American Interest. This issue is always sort of pain because a lot of it has to be done after the academic year is completed, and it is hard to get lots of people to do anything after a certain set of days in May. Also this time we devised a feature on the future of the U.S. armed forces, which locked me into dealing with a series of authors who, with almost no exception, are not particularly good writers (they have other virtues, to be sure, that are arguably a lot more important), who I have never worked with before, and who were generally late with their submissions. It all turned out fine, but it did not leave a lot of leisure time for blogging.
Another reason, however, for ignoring this blog in recent weeks is that I have to confess I had hoped that at least a few colleagues would take to reading it. None have. Indeed, I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that pretty much no one reads anything I write. My book Jewcentricity, published about 10 months ago, has been almost totally ignored--I know of only two short reviews in train, both positive but neither yet published. I published a review of Peter Beinart's new book The Icarus Syndrome in the July 19 issue of National Review (because they asked me to do it and offered money.....) As far as I know, no one has read it, except for maybe the copy-editor over there. Even my publisher seems not to read my essays in The American Interest. He was making all sorts of noises about the futility of the war in Afghanistan the other day, and complaining that the magazine had not pointed out all this. I, as editor, he implied, was responsible for this. I reminded him that we had, too, pointed these things out, most recently in my piece called "Disconnected" in the May-June issue. The magazine over the past five years has run at least a half dozen major pieces on the war and related matters, as well -- all critical of then-present policy. He remembered some of the other essays, I know. But not mine, apparently. He said, in effect, "well, you didn't put your piece on the cover, and you're not famous, so that's why no one reads or remembers what you said." Hard to reply to a remark like that, so I didn't. I guess he's right. That won't persuade me to put my own work on the cover, however.
I am certainly sure some days that I am not only not famous, and that no one reads what I write, but that I am in general doormat material par excellance. Take today.
Today I had to get up very early to make a 7:45 doctor's appointment--just a simple little tryst with my friend Dr. Martin K. to check on how a new blood-pressure medication is working. (It's working well, thank you very much.) But the Ride-On bus broke down just about 200 yards from the Metro. The driver seemed to lose his transmission. He found it again, because the bus got to the platform sooner than many of us did walking away from the breakdown. We just missed a train; those who hung with the bus made it. That's a pisser, ain't it? And it is very muggy today, so that by the time I'd walked that short distance I was already in a sweat--despite my short-sleeve shirt and casual pants. (I only wear a suit and tie in summer when there is some compelling reason to do so.)
Then I found that in addition to blood-pressure tests, I needed to get blood taken to test my potassium and vitamin D levels. Hell if I know what for. "Oh, no"--I say to myself, and here is why: Since changing insurance plans some months ago, I now have to go to a lab, in the same building as the doctor's office, that takes at least an hour just to take a vial of blood--this as against the lab I used to go to where the whole process never took more than ten minutes. And sure enough, the same three slow-witted, slow-moving, dialect-afflicted women managed to waste another whole hour of my time shuffling paper and turning in random circles. It's not just my time they waste, of course, but I can't say I particularly care about what happens to anonymous others, except theoretically. I always have a book with me to read to fill the gap, so the time is not really wasted. But still.....
Eventually I escaped the medical maze and walked back to the Metro, picking it up at Friendship Heights. It's only a four-block walk, but again, because of the humidity, I was re-drenched by the time I get to the Red Line. I took the train to my usual stop, Dupont Circle, and, once again, there were no up-escalators working. This was the case for several days running last month. It is hard to understand how a repetitive and predictable problem like that can go unrepaired for so long, and then recur in almost no time. Today, there was an escalator working, but it had been designated a down escalator. Go figure.
And please understand: We are talking about one of the deepest stations in the whole DC Metro system. There are something like 160 steps from bottom to top when the escalator is frozen, and there are no working elevators on that side of the station either. So some people, older people, obese people (of whom there are shockingly many) have real trouble making it up those steps. It is not good for their cardiac situation. They slow everyone else down, too.
The sheer incompetence of everything about the Ride-On and Metro systems is a wonder to behold. And no one, as far as I can tell, ever gets fired or reprimanded for repeated demonstrations of incompetence. So it continues. This is also the jist of the recent NTSB report on the fatal June 2009 Green Line crash that killed 9 people. Those running the system day to day are poorly educated, present-oriented people with very little sense of responsibility for outcomes, and the system of governance, which is really to blame, lets them persist in it. It's hard to get past the suspicion that Metro is mainly a jobs program for an unfortunately poorly educated minority, and that this is at the bottom of the reason why it is so screwed up. But you're not allowed to say that, because saying it raises accusations that you don't like the minority. Nothing could be further than the truth in my case; what I don't like is the systematic educational disadvantages afflicting this minority, which has a long and complex explanation I have no intention of going into here.
Anyway, so once spewed out of the Dupont Circle exit I go over to the pharmacy to fill my prescription for this blood-pressure medicine. Same people over there except for one new trainee, apparently. The woman who usually takes my script took my script, but instead of taking it to the pharmacist while I begin to wait my ten minutes, she stopped to answer a question from this trainee that inflated itself into several questions, a rant and a harangue taking many minutes to rise and fall. All the while, my script has not made it into the hands of the otherwise idle pharmacist. I did not say anything. Eventually, I got my pills. And then eventually I made it to my office.
And so I considered the morning thus far: I had woken up at about 6:00 am, and now it was 9:30 and I had yet to breakfast. Thank you Ride-On bus system, thank you idiot lab-tech administrators, thank you clueless Metro escalator mechanics, thank you oblivious pharmacy counter clerks. All I can say is that I am deeply thankful that I did not need to make a stop at the bank or the post office. Oh Lord, anything but the post office......
Now for the long-awaited third reason (thought I had forgotten, didn't you?): Blogging is a lot like exercising. If you get out of the habit, it's hard to get back into it. But once you do, you find you have more energy than you imagined possible, for both.
I definitely need to get more exercise, now that the magazine's offices have moved a floor up and I no longer have a shower to use--meaning I cannot commute part way by bike anymore. I did that, from my house in Potomac to the Metro and back, four days a week in the Daylight Savings Time period of the year, for 10 years -- 14 miles roundtrip. It was very good for me, and now I can't do it, because I cannot seem to find a way to replace the shower. All the gyms downtown refuse to let me keep my street cloths locked up over night. They expect people to walk in in their street cloths, change into gym cloths, and change back to leave; what I want to do is just the opposite. The only facilities they have to keep stuff overnight are these tiny wire baskets. They will not make an exception, which they have the physical ability to do. I have asked. I have offered to pay more than regular. They won't do it. The clerks are not paid to make decisions, and they seem not to care: They follow the SOPs to the letter, and their superiors let them. But that leaves me with no option, except maybe to join the Cosmos Club (where I had drinks a few weeks ago with my friend and member Dov Zakheim). But I think I can't afford it, or rather, choose not to afford it
It is clear that if I were famous, not only would people read what I write, but I could get some customized service at the gym. Maybe the elevator at Dupont Circle would always work, too--who knows? If you're going to fantasize, don't pull punches. But I don't know how to get famous (and I am not at all sure I want to). So I suffer or, in Cartesian form: I languish, therefore I am.
But what goes for exercising goes for blogging--that, I think, was my point here. If I just make myself do it more, I'll be able to do it more. That doesn't mean anyone will read it. But so what?
Now that I have wasted your time, dear non-existent reader, with pap and persiflage, you are probably wondering whether I have anything of actual interest to say. Of course I do. Since we're on the subject of incompetence, and incompetence related to infrastructure (buses, trains, health-care system...) in particular, let's stay there for a bit.
We have in The American Interest, as you ought to know if you don't, an ongoing project called "Nation-Building in America" and infrastructure renewal is a subject I have been trying to get covered, to no avail.
To be specific, I have sought for The American Interest an essay on how we should build a 21st century infrastructure for the economic and broadly social good of our country. That, apparently, is where the simple part stops. That is because I define a 21st century infrastructure as an integrated structure that encompasses energy, transportation, communication, airports, water/sanitation and all the rest, bound together by an IT-driven central nervous system. We all know about the “smart grid”, but that’s just about electrical utilities. I am talking about something an order of magnitude above that. I am taking about maximizing the synergies among developing technologies, and I am talking about skipping a technology generation to acquire a truly advanced infrastructure that can serve as real productivity value-added for the economy. It’s not exactly like the opportunity Japan and Germany had after WWII, where the Allies had destroyed their legacy systems, but we’re in such bad shape that it’s almost analogous.
Yet the government seems clueless. The stimulus program was about shovel-ready projects--old technology that it's foolish and wasteful to fix--but of course that that also a jobs programs and little more. The Obama Administration's new investment in railroads is nice, but it's a one-off. It is not integrated into anything, as best I can tell. The President is just jealous that French and Japanese and Chinese trains can go faster than ours. That's what he actually said, in the State of Union address, no less. I waited to hear a vision for infrastructure that was economically sensible and sound in terms of engineering principles. Nothing doing. If this guy is really so smart, why is he consistently so disappointing?
Now, I am not a centralization freak; on the contrary, I am more impressed by the efficiencies of subsidiarity. But there are some public-goods functions that can benefit from technical and engineering synergies, and I think infrastructure in an age of rapid IT advances is one of them. We want an infrastructure that’s efficient in thermodynamic terms, but also desirable in broader social terms, because we know that the choices we make about technology affect social patterns, attitudes and behaviors (think internal combustion engines, highways, suburbs and drive-ins....or think the Pill, for that matter — not all the shaping is spatial in nature). We don’t get integrative efficiencies from dumb luck. They require some planning, some forethought. They also require a capacity to trade short-term for longer-term benefits. Why, for example, do we still keep so many of our power and telecommunications lines up in the air, where they’re vulnerable to every passing windstorm, instead of burying them? Partly because we’re incapable, it seems, much of the time, of front-loading a long-term investment.
Seems to me, too, that if we now need some aspects of this system to be national in scope for the sake of efficiency and rational management (say, the telecommunications piece), then we cannot keep doing on the state level some of the things we’ve always done before. How much sense does it make to have 50 separate licensing schemes when the technology is of national (and international) scale? (Though perhaps there are some functions that would be better de-federalized and given to the states.)
And it seems to me that the principle of modularity needs to be built into a new infrastructure, so that just as newer avionics packages can be put into old airframes (to a point), technological advances can be instituted in infrastructure systems without having to start over every time some component ages. Now we face a mountain of costs because we have let systems age so badly. If they had employed modular designs, we would be able to upgrade without that mountain being so high, and that should be our aim in the future: to use modular design, insofar as possible, to space out our investments, so that maintenance is a form of upgrading, again, insofar as possible.
Moreover, I want this essay to consider what the role of government ought to be to promote (not to own and manage) a new infrastructure. That is what the whole nation-building project is premised on: that if you want genuinely new and better policies leading to better outcomes, you need to consider the design function, because old bureaucracies can rarely do new and different things well, or do them at all.
There are some people I know who argue that government should have zero role in infrastructure, that it all should be privatized. I regard this as an insane remark, but actually, so do most of the people who assert it — because the moment after they got their liberatarian rocks off, so to speak, they acknowledge all the “exceptions” in which some government role was necessary. If you add up all the exceptions, there’s not much ideology left. Any reasonable and historically literate person knows enough of the history of the canals and roads and railroads and telegraph and so on to realize that we need government for a variety of purposes: licensing to ensure health and safety and rational use of scarce public goods, providing an understory market for new technologies, basic science and R&D investments, and so on. There is a logic to some kinds of public monopolies, after all.
The design problem in this regard is that we need a place where the partners and participants involved in building a new infrastructure can convene to decide what to do and how to do it. I have a hard time seeing how people who build electricity grids, people who build road systems, people who build trains and light rail, people who do energy infrastructure, people who do fiber optics, people who plan airports, people who think about financing such things, people who consider safety and environmental issues (one of several necessary governmental functions) and so on, will all somehow get together on their own accord within a private-market framework to plan an integrated system. Without such a place to convene and plan, we will get incremental developments at best, and possibly developments not up to efficient scale. We will get a system that is less than the sum of its parts rather than more. As things stand now, there is no such place in the Federal government, nor is there any interagency arrangement substituting for such a place.
Now, I am mindful that even if a concept for such a place were developed (say, merging the Dept of Transportation, the non-military side of DOE, the FCC and the NTSB) there is a good chance that the U.S. political system, as presently constituted, could not do this right. (Look how the Feds messed up the original DHS proposal to create the dysfunctional monstrosity we have now.) The opportunities for distortion, corruption and God-knows-what are almost too large to imagine. But is that a reason not even to think about it? Moreover, seems to me that the promise of a really major leap forward could attract significant private sector support. Oddly enough, in this economic climate, it may be easier to think and build big than to persuade people to go further into debt to fix already obsolete bridges, rails, roads, water/sanitation systems and so on.
I have explained this project to a few sets of authors in recent months. Some tried and failed because they ignored the governmental piece, after promising me they wouldn't; some did not understand what I wanted to start with. I just don’t see the problem here. I don’t say it’s easy to think practically about this — a writer or team of writers would have to understand both the technical side and how the government works — but this isn’t rocket science. And I am not asking for a book or for the final word: I just am asking someone to start a useful conversation, that’s all. What’s the best infrastructure for our future we can think of, and how do we need to organize ourselves to translate vision into reality? As I said to begin with, simple.
I think I have finally found an author who understands what I want and can do it. We'll see. In the meantime, I went with some optimism to the newly opened offices of Building America's Future (BAF) here in Washington. This is, supposedly, an infrastructure renewal project co-sponsored by Governors Schwarzeneggar, Rendell and Mayor Bloomberg. I told the head of this office, Marcia Hale, that I wanted to help them get out their message. Come to find out, they have no message. They do not have any version of even 2,000, let along 4,000 or 5,000 words they can give me for TAI. So far, it seems, they have only a PR stunt, a minor upper-middle-class jobs project and some rental real estate; they seem to have done no actual thinking at all. If they have, I can find no evidence of it. What a typical Washington escapade. Unkind? Too cynical, you think? Maybe; let's see. So OK, Arnold, Eddie and Michael: Prove me wrong. I dare you.
Mornings like this can peel the paint right off a person's residual optimism.
Well, that's all for now. Come back in days soon to come for commentary on William Graham Sumner, plutocracy, Pakistan, and the scourge of the designated-hitter rule. Promise. And I promise I will not discuss Charlie Rangel and Maxime Waters. Why waste the electrons?
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Elena Kagan
I have never gotten particularly interested in Supreme Court nominees or the Senate hearings over their confirmation or rejection. Not even the Robert Bork and Clarance Thomas episodes made me want to read everything I could get my hands on about them. This is not because I assume the balance on the Court is unimportant; on the contrary, even a clinging familiarity with American history proves easily and quickly the reverse. But I am not a lawyer, and I am not a Constitution expert either, so I don't have a lot of self-confidence in being able to zero in on what a nominee's statements do or don't portend.
I still feel that way, but not so strongly after Ms. Kagan said the following on June 27 as part of her prepared statement: "The Supreme Court, of course, has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals. But the court must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people."
As it happened, the June 28 Washington Post, in a banner quote on the top of the front page, excised just a part of this remark, and displayed her comment as follows: "The Supreme Court must respect the choices made by the American people." The Post used no ellipses, so that a reader would not know that words had been eliminated unless he or she looked deeper into the text. And it is true: The whole remark does not take one's breath away to the same extend as the surgically carved out quotation does. Still.
The whole remark, I think it is fair to say, is a great example of deliberately meaningless equivocation. It is a diplomatic remark if by diplomat one means, as some wag once said, a person who thinks twice about saying nothing. I don't know anyone in this country who thinks that the Court should overstep its proper bounds or violate individual rights. Neither does Elena Kagan. I think it is also fair to say that the Court has to recognize the limits on itself, because those limits are clearly set by the Constitution: The Court is composed of justices nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. It is this last remark, the one the Post's editor chose to highlight, that is non-trivial, and troubling.
Of course, it does sound trivial. It's a good thing, one would think if one did not know any better, to respect the choices made by the American people. Except that in this case it's not a good thing, depending on what choices one is talking about. Sure, the Court has to respect election results; it can't decide that an elected President, say, can't be President because the Court doesn't like him. But that's not what this remark says. If it means anything, it means, as any sentient being can see, that the Court should defer to the moral-cultural sensibilities of public opinion. That is a problem, because that's exactly what the Court was established not to do.
In the American Enlightenment way of seeing things, a republic is distinguished from a democracy. A democracy, as it was generally understood at the time, was a direct, plebiscitory operation, a Rousseau-like beast. A republic was an indirect democracy, a mediated structure insulated from the dangers of mob-like passions by several means. One of these means, in the American case, was a government divided into Executive, Legislative and Judiciary parts--the famous checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution. Another was the system of federalism, which privileged subsidiarity as an organizing principle, though that is not what Jefferson and his associates called it at the time. This system has been mangled by the 17th Amendment, which destroyed a major facet of the federal system, and which also has caused the Judiciary to take a far more active hand in the maintenance of American federalism than the Founders intended. It still exists in attenuated form, however, of which the Electoral College is a remnant. But the main means of protecting the republic against mob-like passions, fads and foibles was the Supreme Court. Of all the branches of government, the Supreme Court is the one that plays the greatest role in protecting representative democracy and, it follows, is also the least directly accountable branch of government. Voter-citizens can't do anything directly about Supreme Court decisions. They can only indirectly influence who sits on the court via electing the President (insulated from the rabble by the Electoral College) and via electing the Senate (insulated from the rabble formerly by State houses). Say what you will about the imperfections of the Constitution, or for that matter of James Madison himself, but this was an act of sheer genius.
And so a question: Unless Kagan missed a critical day in her 8th grade civics class, how the hell can we explain how someone about to become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court could say such a crazy thing, and in a prepared statement no less?
I will give her this: Asked later to comment on a remark that President Obama had made--that the law can get a judge nearly all the way to a decision, but the last little bit needs to come from the judge's heart--Kagan did not take the bait. She said that a judge's heart had nothing to do with the matter; only the law counted, from start to finish. Well, that is comforting, if she really meant it. But it's hard to know what she does mean; her most impressive skill demonstrated to date is her seemingly limitless capacity for equivocation--for using a whole lot of words to say basically nothing.
I am not a Senator, but if it were up to me to vote, I would vote not to confirm based on this one remark alone. It is demonstrative either of ignorance, a general lack of seriousness or an intent to befuddle. I don't know for certain which of the three it is, but all three are grounds for rejection as far as I'm concerned.
I still feel that way, but not so strongly after Ms. Kagan said the following on June 27 as part of her prepared statement: "The Supreme Court, of course, has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals. But the court must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people."
As it happened, the June 28 Washington Post, in a banner quote on the top of the front page, excised just a part of this remark, and displayed her comment as follows: "The Supreme Court must respect the choices made by the American people." The Post used no ellipses, so that a reader would not know that words had been eliminated unless he or she looked deeper into the text. And it is true: The whole remark does not take one's breath away to the same extend as the surgically carved out quotation does. Still.
The whole remark, I think it is fair to say, is a great example of deliberately meaningless equivocation. It is a diplomatic remark if by diplomat one means, as some wag once said, a person who thinks twice about saying nothing. I don't know anyone in this country who thinks that the Court should overstep its proper bounds or violate individual rights. Neither does Elena Kagan. I think it is also fair to say that the Court has to recognize the limits on itself, because those limits are clearly set by the Constitution: The Court is composed of justices nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. It is this last remark, the one the Post's editor chose to highlight, that is non-trivial, and troubling.
Of course, it does sound trivial. It's a good thing, one would think if one did not know any better, to respect the choices made by the American people. Except that in this case it's not a good thing, depending on what choices one is talking about. Sure, the Court has to respect election results; it can't decide that an elected President, say, can't be President because the Court doesn't like him. But that's not what this remark says. If it means anything, it means, as any sentient being can see, that the Court should defer to the moral-cultural sensibilities of public opinion. That is a problem, because that's exactly what the Court was established not to do.
In the American Enlightenment way of seeing things, a republic is distinguished from a democracy. A democracy, as it was generally understood at the time, was a direct, plebiscitory operation, a Rousseau-like beast. A republic was an indirect democracy, a mediated structure insulated from the dangers of mob-like passions by several means. One of these means, in the American case, was a government divided into Executive, Legislative and Judiciary parts--the famous checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution. Another was the system of federalism, which privileged subsidiarity as an organizing principle, though that is not what Jefferson and his associates called it at the time. This system has been mangled by the 17th Amendment, which destroyed a major facet of the federal system, and which also has caused the Judiciary to take a far more active hand in the maintenance of American federalism than the Founders intended. It still exists in attenuated form, however, of which the Electoral College is a remnant. But the main means of protecting the republic against mob-like passions, fads and foibles was the Supreme Court. Of all the branches of government, the Supreme Court is the one that plays the greatest role in protecting representative democracy and, it follows, is also the least directly accountable branch of government. Voter-citizens can't do anything directly about Supreme Court decisions. They can only indirectly influence who sits on the court via electing the President (insulated from the rabble by the Electoral College) and via electing the Senate (insulated from the rabble formerly by State houses). Say what you will about the imperfections of the Constitution, or for that matter of James Madison himself, but this was an act of sheer genius.
And so a question: Unless Kagan missed a critical day in her 8th grade civics class, how the hell can we explain how someone about to become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court could say such a crazy thing, and in a prepared statement no less?
I will give her this: Asked later to comment on a remark that President Obama had made--that the law can get a judge nearly all the way to a decision, but the last little bit needs to come from the judge's heart--Kagan did not take the bait. She said that a judge's heart had nothing to do with the matter; only the law counted, from start to finish. Well, that is comforting, if she really meant it. But it's hard to know what she does mean; her most impressive skill demonstrated to date is her seemingly limitless capacity for equivocation--for using a whole lot of words to say basically nothing.
I am not a Senator, but if it were up to me to vote, I would vote not to confirm based on this one remark alone. It is demonstrative either of ignorance, a general lack of seriousness or an intent to befuddle. I don't know for certain which of the three it is, but all three are grounds for rejection as far as I'm concerned.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Alliances
Last week I attended a meeting here in Washington convened to discuss the future of the U.S. alliance system out to 2025. The convener will remain anonymous, as will the U.S. government agency sponsor. We had a very good discussion, but I thought its level failed to match the goal of the meeting. Here, below, is how I expressed it to the chairman--for what it's worth.
The easiest way to think about U.S. alliances, but not the most useful in my view, is to chart which associates still add to U.S. strength and which do not, and which potential allies might provide more value-added. Obviously, as my TAI colleague Walter Russell Mead pointed out in his blog the very day after this meeting, the “trilateral” U.S./Europe/Japan approach of the Nixon Doctrine was the substitute for an unnatural and declining U.S. preeminence after World War II; it led, somewhat surprisingly to many, not to multipolarity but to a new period of U.S. preeminence. Now that this preeminence in turn may be eroding thanks to an accumulating U.S. domestic policy paralysis and the rise of China and the BRICs, we recognize that the power of Europe and Japan is not what it was (though many exaggerate their relative decline: demographic weakness and GDP stasis are not nearly as important in a pinch as human capital, social trust and institutional coherence). If Europe and Japan cannot make up for what we lack to muster a plurality if not a majority of international influence, India and maybe Brazil and others might do on a global scale what the old trilateral arrangement did in Europe and East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. This is the way a baseball general manager thinks: How can I substitute into the roster better players than the ones I have now?
There's nothing wrong with this, but it is inadequate as intellectual flooring for the building we should want to build. It is also just too obvious to warrant much discussion; any professional for whom the content of the foregoing paragraph is a revelation is probably in the wrong business. The key questions with which to begin, rather, are: “What do we want our allies to do for, and with, us?”, and, as important; “Has the typology or the relative weight of our needs shifted as the world has changed since our legacy alliance system developed during and after WWII?”
A third question follows logically, I think: If there has been a shift, even a subtle one, and if we anticipate further movement away from the way things worked 50 years ago, then how does the nexus between function and structure look? In other words, aside from deciding which allies we seek for which purposes, we need to ask: "How we should design our interactions with them, and how might we want them to interact with each other?"
Until we think through these three questions, we can have no framework to assess our circumstances or set coherent goals. We can also not get far in properly analyzing second- and third-order policy questions such as what overseas basing footprint we should desire, or what kinds of military acquisition (and export market) strategies we should pursue. In my view, approaches that do not set out these questions as guideposts may be adequate for dealing with present policy questions, and for planning out a year or three. But they cannot match up against a request to look out to 2025 and beyond.
What We Want Allies to Do
A typology of alliance utility might look something like this:
First, we want allies who can (and will) fight with us in interstate wars (and hence help to deter them).
Second, we want allies, local and external, who can (and will) fight with us in insurgencies (intrastate contingencies).
Third, we want allies who can perform pre- and post-conflict stabilization, reconstruction and peacekeeping missions—allies, in other words, with full-array or selected civilian expeditionary capabilities.
Fourth, we want allies who can lend legitimacy to U.S. policies and principles simply by virtue of their symbolic presence at our side.
Fifth, we want allies in order to prevent potential rivals from allying with or wooing other states away from us into potentially hostile coalitions.
Sixth, we want allies in order to promote commercial relationships (within a generally liberal global trading regime) that may become strategic.
Seventh, we want allies to vindicate past investments and sacrifices so that the American public will incline to support a responsible internationalist foreign policy.
Some allies can do all seven of these things for us, others only a few or perhaps just one. How we invest in allied capacities ought to be a function of how deep and diverse allied help can be, it being understood that by building up of allied capacities we invariably augment the autonomy of their decision-making processes.
Has the mix of these seven utilities changed with the evolution of international politics over the past half century? I would say it has. Our need for allies to fight interstate wars has declined, but our need for local allies to aid us in intrastate wars (and external allies to aid us in stabilization, reconstruction and peacekeeping efforts) has risen. I would say that our need for allies for purposes of legitimacy has risen as the global normative climate has changed (become more democratized), but our need to keep neutrals from allying with rivals has declined (with the end of the Cold War). I would say, too, that our need for allies to advance commercial relationships has risen as the world economy has become more complex and integrated, but our need for allies to vindicate past investments and sacrifices for domestic purposes has declined with distance from World War II and Vietnam.
I think that a recognition of these changes should inform U.S. diplomacy and military planning across a wide range of issues. I do not have space or time to detail all these now, but one example may illustrate the general principle.
Most historians now agree that the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War was a blunder, saddling the United States with a possession it could not readily defend. Even TR came fairly quickly to this conclusion, and he was right; that possession helped cause the Pacific War with Japan.
In 1898 we went to the Philippines; now the problems of indefensibility and access are coming to us, in a manner of speaking, thanks to new military technologies. We have assumed in recent decades a very permissive environment when it comes to getting to and operating from U.S. bases in allied territory. If this permissive environment is compromised, it ought to force a rethinking of how we are deployed abroad, for what purposes and with what broader implications. Thus, for example, there is nothing that U.S. forces inside the Gulf, in Bahrain, Qatar and elsewhere, can usefully do that an over-the-horizon posture cannot also do at lower political cost. All those U.S. facilities and personnel do is create a rich target set for Iran; they are potential hostages in a war, our having brought Pearl Harbor close to them (to continue the Philippines analogue). We do not need bases inside the Gulf of that size and nature; we do need local allies to lend legitimacy to an informal anti-Iranian alliance, but our military presence in such numbers probably on balance reduces our ability to do that because, again on balance, it delegitimizes the authority of the regimes in the eyes of local populations. We cannot defend those regimes against resolute intrastate challenges, and of course that is not what U.S. forces in the Gulf are for anyway. But we are stupid to act out of habit in ways that make such challenges more likely.
Structure and Function
The legacy alliance system we have is segmented. We have a series of bilateral alliances and “special” relationships (like major non-NATO allies whose relationships with us have not been ratified by the Senate), and we have two (or two and a half) cases of multilateral alliances (NATO, ANZUS and the Rio Treaty). We have relations with all these allies and alliance systems, which arose and tend to be useful as agents in regional problematics. But in an age when more problems and opportunities are transregional in nature, we do not have an alliance system in which partners can interact with each other except in ad hoc ways.
If it were possible politically today (it is not….., but it was in 1990-92 when this idea first entered my head, and may be again), it would be wise to diminish the segmentation of our legacy alliance structure. This would better align U.S. policy goals with the means to achieve them. A more integrated, institutionalized alliance system (with a permanent secretariat and a real budget) would give us modular options that would produce gains in flexibility, burden-sharing and also legitimacy enhancement and domestic staying power if the basis of the integrated system rested on shared liberal democratic principles.
Since the members of such an alliance, with the United States at the hub, would compose the richest, technologically most advanced and most politically stable nations on earth, it would put us in a better position to align diplomatic, economic and political elements of statecraft to create an incentive structure for powerful autocracies to avoid irritating us, and for some petty ones to make domestic political adjustments so as ultimately to join us. The latter dynamic might work a little like the acquis communautaire of the European Union, and we would be wise to study that method carefully as a model that has worked well.
Specifically with regard to Third World autocracies, having an integrated global alliance system would enable us to say to impoverished autocracies that we will only help you economically if you help yourselves politically, because the ultimate source of your economic penury is your political dysfunction. An MCC-like concept would replace entirely the present USAID concept of relating to these countries. Its ultimate purpose would be to strengthen other legitimate sovereignties, the better to prevent failed states and “gray zones” that breed political violence, transnational crime and terrorism. This should be the opportunity-purpose of such an alliance: to shape the social milieu of developing societies in an historical period of great disruption, lest many of them collapse or lose so much governance capacity as to amount to more or less the same thing. Our current, segmented legacy alliance structure is incapable of achieving such a goal, and we certainly cannot achieve it by ourselves.
It would be coy not to admit that this alliance structure is meant in some respects to displace the functional aspirations of the United Nations. The UN is hopeless, and will always be hopeless for inherent structural reasons, in doing anything of real positive significance. For political reasons it would be unwise for the United States to withdraw from the UN or its functional agencies, but it is in the U.S. national interest that many of the functions the UN claims to be able to do but cannot do still get done. We need an alternative venue that actually works by properly arraying incentive structures and backing them with real power and appeal. That is what a new and improved U.S. alliance system design can do.
As suggested above, it takes a special molten time in international politics and real American leadership to get anything as bold as this accomplished. Truman, Acheson and Marshall seized their opportunity and built the institutions of the West world that today form the basis for the even broader concert of nations sketched here. Alas, today we have no such leadership and the times are not so molten. More is the pity, for no matter which states we switch in or out of our alliance system in coming years, even out to 2025, that system will remain less than the sum of its parts instead of more so long as its basic design remains unchanged.
The easiest way to think about U.S. alliances, but not the most useful in my view, is to chart which associates still add to U.S. strength and which do not, and which potential allies might provide more value-added. Obviously, as my TAI colleague Walter Russell Mead pointed out in his blog the very day after this meeting, the “trilateral” U.S./Europe/Japan approach of the Nixon Doctrine was the substitute for an unnatural and declining U.S. preeminence after World War II; it led, somewhat surprisingly to many, not to multipolarity but to a new period of U.S. preeminence. Now that this preeminence in turn may be eroding thanks to an accumulating U.S. domestic policy paralysis and the rise of China and the BRICs, we recognize that the power of Europe and Japan is not what it was (though many exaggerate their relative decline: demographic weakness and GDP stasis are not nearly as important in a pinch as human capital, social trust and institutional coherence). If Europe and Japan cannot make up for what we lack to muster a plurality if not a majority of international influence, India and maybe Brazil and others might do on a global scale what the old trilateral arrangement did in Europe and East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. This is the way a baseball general manager thinks: How can I substitute into the roster better players than the ones I have now?
There's nothing wrong with this, but it is inadequate as intellectual flooring for the building we should want to build. It is also just too obvious to warrant much discussion; any professional for whom the content of the foregoing paragraph is a revelation is probably in the wrong business. The key questions with which to begin, rather, are: “What do we want our allies to do for, and with, us?”, and, as important; “Has the typology or the relative weight of our needs shifted as the world has changed since our legacy alliance system developed during and after WWII?”
A third question follows logically, I think: If there has been a shift, even a subtle one, and if we anticipate further movement away from the way things worked 50 years ago, then how does the nexus between function and structure look? In other words, aside from deciding which allies we seek for which purposes, we need to ask: "How we should design our interactions with them, and how might we want them to interact with each other?"
Until we think through these three questions, we can have no framework to assess our circumstances or set coherent goals. We can also not get far in properly analyzing second- and third-order policy questions such as what overseas basing footprint we should desire, or what kinds of military acquisition (and export market) strategies we should pursue. In my view, approaches that do not set out these questions as guideposts may be adequate for dealing with present policy questions, and for planning out a year or three. But they cannot match up against a request to look out to 2025 and beyond.
What We Want Allies to Do
A typology of alliance utility might look something like this:
First, we want allies who can (and will) fight with us in interstate wars (and hence help to deter them).
Second, we want allies, local and external, who can (and will) fight with us in insurgencies (intrastate contingencies).
Third, we want allies who can perform pre- and post-conflict stabilization, reconstruction and peacekeeping missions—allies, in other words, with full-array or selected civilian expeditionary capabilities.
Fourth, we want allies who can lend legitimacy to U.S. policies and principles simply by virtue of their symbolic presence at our side.
Fifth, we want allies in order to prevent potential rivals from allying with or wooing other states away from us into potentially hostile coalitions.
Sixth, we want allies in order to promote commercial relationships (within a generally liberal global trading regime) that may become strategic.
Seventh, we want allies to vindicate past investments and sacrifices so that the American public will incline to support a responsible internationalist foreign policy.
Some allies can do all seven of these things for us, others only a few or perhaps just one. How we invest in allied capacities ought to be a function of how deep and diverse allied help can be, it being understood that by building up of allied capacities we invariably augment the autonomy of their decision-making processes.
Has the mix of these seven utilities changed with the evolution of international politics over the past half century? I would say it has. Our need for allies to fight interstate wars has declined, but our need for local allies to aid us in intrastate wars (and external allies to aid us in stabilization, reconstruction and peacekeeping efforts) has risen. I would say that our need for allies for purposes of legitimacy has risen as the global normative climate has changed (become more democratized), but our need to keep neutrals from allying with rivals has declined (with the end of the Cold War). I would say, too, that our need for allies to advance commercial relationships has risen as the world economy has become more complex and integrated, but our need for allies to vindicate past investments and sacrifices for domestic purposes has declined with distance from World War II and Vietnam.
I think that a recognition of these changes should inform U.S. diplomacy and military planning across a wide range of issues. I do not have space or time to detail all these now, but one example may illustrate the general principle.
Most historians now agree that the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War was a blunder, saddling the United States with a possession it could not readily defend. Even TR came fairly quickly to this conclusion, and he was right; that possession helped cause the Pacific War with Japan.
In 1898 we went to the Philippines; now the problems of indefensibility and access are coming to us, in a manner of speaking, thanks to new military technologies. We have assumed in recent decades a very permissive environment when it comes to getting to and operating from U.S. bases in allied territory. If this permissive environment is compromised, it ought to force a rethinking of how we are deployed abroad, for what purposes and with what broader implications. Thus, for example, there is nothing that U.S. forces inside the Gulf, in Bahrain, Qatar and elsewhere, can usefully do that an over-the-horizon posture cannot also do at lower political cost. All those U.S. facilities and personnel do is create a rich target set for Iran; they are potential hostages in a war, our having brought Pearl Harbor close to them (to continue the Philippines analogue). We do not need bases inside the Gulf of that size and nature; we do need local allies to lend legitimacy to an informal anti-Iranian alliance, but our military presence in such numbers probably on balance reduces our ability to do that because, again on balance, it delegitimizes the authority of the regimes in the eyes of local populations. We cannot defend those regimes against resolute intrastate challenges, and of course that is not what U.S. forces in the Gulf are for anyway. But we are stupid to act out of habit in ways that make such challenges more likely.
Structure and Function
The legacy alliance system we have is segmented. We have a series of bilateral alliances and “special” relationships (like major non-NATO allies whose relationships with us have not been ratified by the Senate), and we have two (or two and a half) cases of multilateral alliances (NATO, ANZUS and the Rio Treaty). We have relations with all these allies and alliance systems, which arose and tend to be useful as agents in regional problematics. But in an age when more problems and opportunities are transregional in nature, we do not have an alliance system in which partners can interact with each other except in ad hoc ways.
If it were possible politically today (it is not….., but it was in 1990-92 when this idea first entered my head, and may be again), it would be wise to diminish the segmentation of our legacy alliance structure. This would better align U.S. policy goals with the means to achieve them. A more integrated, institutionalized alliance system (with a permanent secretariat and a real budget) would give us modular options that would produce gains in flexibility, burden-sharing and also legitimacy enhancement and domestic staying power if the basis of the integrated system rested on shared liberal democratic principles.
Since the members of such an alliance, with the United States at the hub, would compose the richest, technologically most advanced and most politically stable nations on earth, it would put us in a better position to align diplomatic, economic and political elements of statecraft to create an incentive structure for powerful autocracies to avoid irritating us, and for some petty ones to make domestic political adjustments so as ultimately to join us. The latter dynamic might work a little like the acquis communautaire of the European Union, and we would be wise to study that method carefully as a model that has worked well.
Specifically with regard to Third World autocracies, having an integrated global alliance system would enable us to say to impoverished autocracies that we will only help you economically if you help yourselves politically, because the ultimate source of your economic penury is your political dysfunction. An MCC-like concept would replace entirely the present USAID concept of relating to these countries. Its ultimate purpose would be to strengthen other legitimate sovereignties, the better to prevent failed states and “gray zones” that breed political violence, transnational crime and terrorism. This should be the opportunity-purpose of such an alliance: to shape the social milieu of developing societies in an historical period of great disruption, lest many of them collapse or lose so much governance capacity as to amount to more or less the same thing. Our current, segmented legacy alliance structure is incapable of achieving such a goal, and we certainly cannot achieve it by ourselves.
It would be coy not to admit that this alliance structure is meant in some respects to displace the functional aspirations of the United Nations. The UN is hopeless, and will always be hopeless for inherent structural reasons, in doing anything of real positive significance. For political reasons it would be unwise for the United States to withdraw from the UN or its functional agencies, but it is in the U.S. national interest that many of the functions the UN claims to be able to do but cannot do still get done. We need an alternative venue that actually works by properly arraying incentive structures and backing them with real power and appeal. That is what a new and improved U.S. alliance system design can do.
As suggested above, it takes a special molten time in international politics and real American leadership to get anything as bold as this accomplished. Truman, Acheson and Marshall seized their opportunity and built the institutions of the West world that today form the basis for the even broader concert of nations sketched here. Alas, today we have no such leadership and the times are not so molten. More is the pity, for no matter which states we switch in or out of our alliance system in coming years, even out to 2025, that system will remain less than the sum of its parts instead of more so long as its basic design remains unchanged.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Europe and Citizens United
It has been nearly a month since I have visited this space; too bad, but the day-job comes first. I don't know how daily bloggers find time to read or think. Maybe they don't find time, which would, I suppose, explain the quality of much of the blogosphere. But never mind that.
I have been thinking of many things, and reading and learning as I go. But I have generated as many questions as I have answers. Let me summarize them with reference to three events.
The European Crisis. What has been going on in Europe, centered around Greece, in the past few weeks has been extraordinary. As luck would have it, The American Interest is coming out in a few weeks with a major cluster called "What Happened to `Europe'?". This is just dumb luck--Joe Joffe suggested doing something like this before the Greek crisis burst open--but I'll take it. The main question is, has the EU and the European "model" hit the wall of reality, and the wall won, or are we just witnessing growing pains that will leave the experiment stronger for the challenge?
I suspect the former, but who knows? The $1 trillion bailout seems impressive, but it is not enough to save the euro. The idea of having one currency and one central bank, but zero political center and 27 separate tax and fiscal policies is crazy. To support a single currency requires a federal arrangement that harmonizes countercyclical processes region-wide. So I have been saying for 15 years. If the Europeans jump to that, they may pull off a great advance. This was always the plan: Do something that won't work unless you do something else, and so on and on, jumping ahead from crisis to crisis. That's a nutty way to run a railroad or build a federal union, but the juggernaut has stayed on track more or less until now because of the shield provided by American military and economic power. Now that, for various reasons, that shield is no longer what it was, we--that is, the Europeans--are in serious trouble.
So what has the EU done? It has not proposed, yet at least, building the federal structures that can support a common currency. Instead, it has faced the problem of financial overextension--too much debt--by extending further--by taking on more debt. And in the process it has cast moral hazard to the howling wind. That is not all. It has allowed the whole wager, all $1 trillion of it, to depend on the prospect of fundamentally altering the nature of Greek government and society. The Greeks (of all people)! This would be funny if it were not so serious, and serious not just for Europeans but for Americans, too. Greeks have been evading taxes since Ottoman times. No one is going to change their sport anytime soon.
Capitalism, Democracy & Law. That's the other main cluster in the forthcoming July/August issue of TAI. And here, two questions have assailed me.
First, all three of my authors writing about Citizens United have focused entirely on the supply side of the problem: how to get money to politicians in ways that do not abet corruption and unfairness. Not one of them has given so much as a single thought to the demand side. The average cost of election campaigns, in constant dollars, has nearly quadrupled in the past quarter century. Why I keep asking; no one knows for sure. I think it has a lot to doing with the cost of TV ads, and rising passions in the culture wars, but there are many, academics as well as shills for corporations, who say no, it's not so. Maybe the issues in the relevant elections brought out more corporate money than ever before, and maybe the financial sector --a.k.a. Wall Street--led the way. But it has to have some explanation; what is it, then? We don't have that explanation because, as best I can tell, no one pays any attention to the demand side, and I think this is a form of intellectual madness.
Second, I wish someone would spend more time clarifying the relationship between capitalism and democracy. We all know the convenient and comforting myth which claims that markets and democracy always support and reinforce each other. Michael Novak has written a lot about that, as have many others. But this is only a partial truth. Yes, there are elements of a market system that build morals; I agree with that. Markets are not evil. But capitalism, because of the inherent inequality of talent and virtue, as Jefferson once put it to Adams (or was it the other way around?) necessarily generates inequality. But political democracy aims to guarantee equality in terms of citizenship. So rightthere you have an inherent and eternal tension: One-man, one-vote clashes with the fact that any one man will be more or less able to influence political discourse through money than another. Economic inequality does not rest easily with political equality.
At the extremes, it follows logically that there will be times when democracy must be protected against capitalism (like now), and other times when capitalism must be protected against democracy, by which I means surges of irrational, idealistic populism (as between 1907 and 1913). There is never a stable equipoise between the two. Yet we want both and need both. Managing the balance is what American politics is really about. The idea that there is no problem, that capitalism can never menace democracy and democracy can never menace capitalism are twin forms of utopianism, the former of the Right, the latter of the Left. I don't understand how anyone cannot see this. But this, I guess, is my problem.
Well, that's enough for now.
I have been thinking of many things, and reading and learning as I go. But I have generated as many questions as I have answers. Let me summarize them with reference to three events.
The European Crisis. What has been going on in Europe, centered around Greece, in the past few weeks has been extraordinary. As luck would have it, The American Interest is coming out in a few weeks with a major cluster called "What Happened to `Europe'?". This is just dumb luck--Joe Joffe suggested doing something like this before the Greek crisis burst open--but I'll take it. The main question is, has the EU and the European "model" hit the wall of reality, and the wall won, or are we just witnessing growing pains that will leave the experiment stronger for the challenge?
I suspect the former, but who knows? The $1 trillion bailout seems impressive, but it is not enough to save the euro. The idea of having one currency and one central bank, but zero political center and 27 separate tax and fiscal policies is crazy. To support a single currency requires a federal arrangement that harmonizes countercyclical processes region-wide. So I have been saying for 15 years. If the Europeans jump to that, they may pull off a great advance. This was always the plan: Do something that won't work unless you do something else, and so on and on, jumping ahead from crisis to crisis. That's a nutty way to run a railroad or build a federal union, but the juggernaut has stayed on track more or less until now because of the shield provided by American military and economic power. Now that, for various reasons, that shield is no longer what it was, we--that is, the Europeans--are in serious trouble.
So what has the EU done? It has not proposed, yet at least, building the federal structures that can support a common currency. Instead, it has faced the problem of financial overextension--too much debt--by extending further--by taking on more debt. And in the process it has cast moral hazard to the howling wind. That is not all. It has allowed the whole wager, all $1 trillion of it, to depend on the prospect of fundamentally altering the nature of Greek government and society. The Greeks (of all people)! This would be funny if it were not so serious, and serious not just for Europeans but for Americans, too. Greeks have been evading taxes since Ottoman times. No one is going to change their sport anytime soon.
Capitalism, Democracy & Law. That's the other main cluster in the forthcoming July/August issue of TAI. And here, two questions have assailed me.
First, all three of my authors writing about Citizens United have focused entirely on the supply side of the problem: how to get money to politicians in ways that do not abet corruption and unfairness. Not one of them has given so much as a single thought to the demand side. The average cost of election campaigns, in constant dollars, has nearly quadrupled in the past quarter century. Why I keep asking; no one knows for sure. I think it has a lot to doing with the cost of TV ads, and rising passions in the culture wars, but there are many, academics as well as shills for corporations, who say no, it's not so. Maybe the issues in the relevant elections brought out more corporate money than ever before, and maybe the financial sector --a.k.a. Wall Street--led the way. But it has to have some explanation; what is it, then? We don't have that explanation because, as best I can tell, no one pays any attention to the demand side, and I think this is a form of intellectual madness.
Second, I wish someone would spend more time clarifying the relationship between capitalism and democracy. We all know the convenient and comforting myth which claims that markets and democracy always support and reinforce each other. Michael Novak has written a lot about that, as have many others. But this is only a partial truth. Yes, there are elements of a market system that build morals; I agree with that. Markets are not evil. But capitalism, because of the inherent inequality of talent and virtue, as Jefferson once put it to Adams (or was it the other way around?) necessarily generates inequality. But political democracy aims to guarantee equality in terms of citizenship. So rightthere you have an inherent and eternal tension: One-man, one-vote clashes with the fact that any one man will be more or less able to influence political discourse through money than another. Economic inequality does not rest easily with political equality.
At the extremes, it follows logically that there will be times when democracy must be protected against capitalism (like now), and other times when capitalism must be protected against democracy, by which I means surges of irrational, idealistic populism (as between 1907 and 1913). There is never a stable equipoise between the two. Yet we want both and need both. Managing the balance is what American politics is really about. The idea that there is no problem, that capitalism can never menace democracy and democracy can never menace capitalism are twin forms of utopianism, the former of the Right, the latter of the Left. I don't understand how anyone cannot see this. But this, I guess, is my problem.
Well, that's enough for now.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Reclaimed Powers
There is plenty to say about the President these days, including about the Nuclear Summit, so-called. But I will resist such comments for now. Instead I want to offer an extended book review on a topic not directly related to goings on in Washington--only indirectly related. Stick with this blog post and you'll see why I say that.
Back in 1987 David Gutmann, a professor of psychiatry and education at Northwestern, published Reclaimed Powers, with a subtitle "Toward a New Psychology of Men and Women in Later Life." It was published by Basic Books, a pretty big, commercial house. The book was not widely reviewed, however, and never attained the status of a must-read classic even in its own field--gerontology--let alone social science in general. I think that's too bad.
Even though its subject matter was hardly in my own field, I read it anyway because I have long believed that one has to balance depth and width in one's reading about human society and culture if one is not to make foolish mistakes of narrowness and myopia. I read it probably in 1988 or 1989, when I had not yet turned 40 years old. Now I am on the other side of 59; and I read it again just this month. What a difference twenty years can make when it comes to understanding and appreciating a book, particularly when it is this book. When I read it the first time, I understood it intellectually, in my head, but I failed to feel it. I was too young. When I was 38, my three children were 8, 4 and 2, and my wife was still capable of bearing children. As you will see, this matters.
So what, basically, did Gutmann argue? He argued that, contrary to common conceptions, when people reach a post-parental age they do not hurtle toward decline and death in a catastrophic spiral, but rather acquire new capacities to discern and act. There is developmental growth in the third third of life just as there is in the first and second thirds. He argues further that this is not culture-bound, but universal. It is organic, biological in the individual because the social character of the species has made it so through the slow but steady and inexorable exertions of evolution. These powers of the third third of life are functional in evolutionary terms, in other words; that's why they exist: They have been selected for.
Gutmann apparently understood a long time ago that the infamous nature-nurture debate is a sterile, misleading miasma of ignorance. When one is dealing with an inherently social species, like all primate species, it is not an either/or proposition. Nurture, via culture, is not separate from "nature" but co-dependent with it. Human societies perform certain functions via cultural constructs that are species-functional, and over time these functions shape societies' individual members. Groups of early humans who did not manage to create culture--shared, idealized understandings of forces acknowledged to be loose in the world--were at a severe survival disadvantage and in fact did not survive or did so only at the margins. Hence the recent argument by Nicholas Wade, for example, that religion exists today because it was species functional: By advancing culture it advanced cooperation and morale, hence providing advantages to the groups that developed it to higher levels than other groups. Anyway.....back to Gutmann.
Now what, specifically, is the evolutionary purpose of third-third of life developmentalism? It has to do with parenting. Gutmann argues that humans make a basic trade-off: Because our babies are born stupid and helpless, parenting (what Gutmann calls the parental emergency) takes longer and requires more sacrifice than it does in other species. But it pays off because, over the long run, relying on the development of the neocortex to produce new learning is much more effective an evolutionary strategy than relying on habitual, instinctual old learning, as in most animals.
Gutmann argues that effective human parenting is inherently difficult, however, for it must provide not only physical but also emotional security for the psychologically malleable child. Parents need help in coping with their protracted burdens, and with the personal sacrifices they must made to meet them. They get this help, he argues, in two ways: women get the help they need via the extended family in traditional folk cultures, and men get the help they need through the vehicle of culture.
The extended family helps women to sublimate their capacity for aggression, and culture helps men sublimate their longing for autonomy. Key to both are grandparents, or what Gutmann calls emeritus parents. Grandparents not only teach their own children how to be parents when instruction is required, but they reinforce the larger structures--extended family and culture (mainly religion)--that help buffer the extraordinary demands of parenting. This transgenerational conception of parenting animals who depend on the new learning of the neocortex allows Gutmann to state: "We do not have elders because we have a human gift and modern capacity for keeping people alive; instead, we are human because we have elders."
More than that, Gutmann argues, psychiatrist that he is, male and female children are socialized differently as they practice up, so to speak, for their roles as mothers and fathers. This development, like all human development, goes through three stages: surgent, active and sculpted. Girls lose their "tom-boy" aggressiveness, their future-oriented instrumental capacities and turn inward to hearth and home. They become gentle and more docile. Boys learn to live at the perimeter, the dangerous outskirts of the village; they become aggressive protectors of the inside. As parents, they continue these roles in active and then sculpted, institutionalized ways that, while they vary in appearance from culture to culture, are universal in the critical function they perform. Females becoming nurturing mothers, fathers warrior protectors of their wives and children.
Ah, but when kids grow up and leave the nest and the post-parental phase of life dawns, these tendencies are reversed. Men gradually become more withdrawn, gentle and passive, more present than future oriented. They regain the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. Woman, on the other hand, because more assertive, more aggressive, more outward- and future-looking, also regaining the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. In a sense, in older life men and women exchange roles, but as they do they gain, or regain, abilities to see and understand that make them ideal grandparents and pillars of the larger society.
Reclaimed Powers is a serious, social science book, with field-work-derived data explained in it. It most likely won't serve you well as a beach book in the weeks and months ahead. If you want to understand the data Gutmann draws on and how he draws on it, and if you want to go beyond the bare summary of his argument I provide here, you'll have to read the book. But you must know that in describing the new developmental capacities of the third third of life Gutmann also draws on ethnography and folklore in a most charming and illuminating way. Just about every culture, he points out, tells stories of strong older women--whether as scary witches and demons in the afterlife, or as priestesses, sexy nymphs and the like. There are also universal folk tropes that describe the occult, mystical powers of "strange" old men. Gutmann doesn't quite make this point explicit, but I will make it for him: Young men are creatures of the spacial frontier, out on the perimeter protecting the village or raiding other villages. Old men are also out on the frontier, but the frontier of time, not space. Gutmann beautifully describes the pre-literate mind as being all about boundaries, and of course this is confirmed brilliantly in the work of the late Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 1966, in particular).
The universality of these cultural representations, Gutmann says, proves how deep these tacit social understandings go, and shows that they are species-wide and evolutionarily driven. It can't be just coincidence that so many pre-literate cultures with no contact among them all hatch images of old men and old women that are discernibly, typologically so similar. How can it be that just about every traditional society, for example, has the figure of the matriarch, the assertive older woman, who owns the key to the pantry and acts through her eldest son--and terrorizes his wife, her daughter-in-law--to wield social power? This is no coincidence, though I suspect someone intimately familiar with endogamous Pashtun or Arab societies would have an easier time recognizing these idealized characters than most modern Westerners.
The most interesting part of the book is in some ways the least developed. But this is not Gutmann's fault. He had to present his methodology and his data, as all social scientists must, and like a good social scientist he was reluctant to go too far beyond where his data allowed. Speculation is fine, to a point; yet I find Gutmann's end-of-book speculations ripe for further thought and development. (So I asked him, now 85 years old, to do that, and he has agreed to do it in The American Interest; I look forward to this.) So let me characterize these speculations.
First, since Gutmann insists that the capacities of the third-third of life are species-engrained, he wants to know what happens when those surgent urges no longer have the psychosocial "space" of the traditional folk society in which to play out. What happens when there is no village housing the extended family, so that the surgent may become active and then sculpted within the social matrix? What happens when the historically natural kin-contiguity of the three-generational family falls to the nuclear family and the community-sundering mobility of modern societies? What happens when religion is no longer at the center of culture? What happens in secular cities to the active developmentalism of the third third of life? Does it still get sculpted into institutional form, or does it wither, become displaced or distorted?
Without going into detail, Gutmann argues that in those circumstances--most characteristically defined by secular cities--in which there is no outlet, no psychosocial space for the role of emeritus parents, older people, especially men, tend to lose a sense of purpose, to lose their sense of dignity and, rather too often, their sanity. Gutmann, it is fair to say (though he is not explicit on the point), sees dementia as a more complex ailment than does a conventional gerontologist--as a social condition of the soul as much as an individual condition of the body. But he goes further: He argues that in societies where elders cannot play the role for which evolution has shaped them, children suffer too--indeed, everybody suffers. Here it is worth quoting Gutmann at some length:
What Gutmann is doing here is establishing the links between the role of male gerontocracy, religion and the capacity for culture in a society. No old men in positions of respect and religious dignity, he essentially says, no culture--no shared sense of social origins and understandings. Culture has to be sacralized, one way or another, to be effective. He goes on:
What happens in secular cities? We see examples not, says Gutmann, of changed cultures but of no, or less, culture. There are fewer shared understandings. There is no sacralized means of producing common ideals except--Heaven forbid--politics. Modernization and urbanization, for various reasons the book explains, erode the conditions under which gerontocracy can perform its age-old functions for society. We are deculturized. Despite the psychiatric language, you will get the idea:
In other words, the phrase "urban jungle" is not just a metaphor. Despite the apparent thickness of civilization in an urban environment, in a deculturized city individuals are limited by fewer, not more, social constraints.
Deculturation has broad social implications. Gutmann argues that the egalitarian ideal can eventually bring about consequences that destroy the founding culture--and here Gutmann echoes somewhat some of the arguments of Daniel Bell and others in describing the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The impulse to equality, he says, which first aimed to end restrictions on ordinary human rights, "ends by politicizing the complaint against existential restrictions." The result is that values are no longer thought of as objective, or as having a validity outside of the moment. "In recent times," said Gutmann,
Gutmann then describes the congealing potential of strong culture--where a great deal is shared among members of a society--and contrasts it with those not of a different but of a weak culture. Under conditions of deculturation,
In short, more "progressive", individualist "culture" actually sets the stage for a far less liberal society. Of course we already know that the postmodernist emphasis on "narratives" in which only women can understand women, whites whites, blacks blacks, gays gays and so on resembles nothing more than the racial "essences" theory of fascism. So Gutmann's observation should not surprise us. Indeed, we should be able to see that the relativization and democratization of value production has not led to a more tolerant society; it has led rather to a more atomized one. We have not replaced an intolerant, narrowly defined culture with a wider, more tolerant one; we have replaced it with less culture altogether. We have reduced what we hold in common, and so forced ourselves back onto narrower bands of consanguinity. We are thus almost all now hyphenated Americans as a result. That is how people speak and think in these recent decades, especially in our cities, and now you can see why. Still don't believe it? Walk though any American center city area with your eyes wide open, and you will believe.
Gutmann also is able to explain why the dethronement of the elders leads to a rash of social maladies far beyond the pale of gerontology:
The aged suffer particularly from this as they lose their special developmental milieus, their special bases for self-esteem, and their traditional character as hero, taking on their modern character, as victim, instead. But it is not only the aged who suffer. The revolution against gerontocracy, Gutmann points out,
I think there may be implications to Gutmann's analysis that he himself does not cite. For example, many scholars have argued that the inability of modern secular and highly urbanized societies to reproduce themselves, and so fall into demographic crisis, is related to the economics of raising children, about which William McNeill has written so brilliantly. But the freakonomics fad notwithstanding, economics is not, as usual, capable of fashioning a whole explanation for any broadly social phenomenon: Parenting in current circumstances in the secular West is not only expensive, it is very difficult and even dangerous when attempted by the socially and culturally unbuffered nuclear family. And so Gutmann is able to conclude, "When the elders are diminished, much of our common life is eventually diminished with them. And as undisguised narcissism tends increasingly to become the coinage of social relations, all unproductive, dependent cohorts--children, the handicapped, the aged--are put at risk. . . . Geronticide and infanticide, elder abuse and child abuse, predict to each other across societies."
Of course they do; and humans have tended not to like either form of murder, which may well be one reason our distant ancestors favored farming villages over hunter-gatherer existence, because the former did not require abandoning the very old, the very young and the weak. And now we can understand better why Abraham Joshua Heschel used to insist that one judge any society by how it treats its very old and its very young, because he too realized that these were inextricably linked.
Let's end now with one last remark from Gutmann, after which he will have earned a well-deserved rest from speaking:
Again, I think the potential to speculate beyond Gutmann's last sentence back in 1989 is irresistible. What, specifically, might the signs of a culture brought down be?
Why do we have a society in America that undervalues thrift and savings, and a set of financial and economic elites prone to generate chaos because they have forgotten the difference between getting rich and producing wealth?
Why do we have such astronomically high divorce rates and populations of single-dwellers? Why more broadly do affluence and loneliness walk hand in hand, giving rise as they go to our substance abuse contagion? Why do so many people, again primarily urban dwellers, seem unable to delay the gratification of any desire and so give rise to legions of otherwise decent people who can imagine abortion as a form of casual birth control?
Why can we not, in an age that claims to be environmentally aware, take inter-generational responsibility seriously--just look at the deficit and national debt? Why can we not resist the urge to marketize any gadget or gimmick no matter how little we have thought about the consequences?
Could it be that we have shattered the transmission belt by which basic values are passed down in sharable form in our society, severed that gossamer thread of memory which preserves what we have learned over the generations? Indeed, have we fallen big time for the biggest con there is--indulgence masquerading in the garb of personal "liberation"? Have the baby-boomers perhaps failed ever to grow up? Are they stalled in a kind of permanent adolescence, the most selfish and clueless generation in American history?
I am still a big Dylan fan, but I have to note that we were once told that "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and also not to trust anyone over 30. Well, the times have indeed changed, and now we can hardly trust anyone at all. Go find a sad old man and do something to make him happy, to respect his dignity. You'll feel better, too.
Back in 1987 David Gutmann, a professor of psychiatry and education at Northwestern, published Reclaimed Powers, with a subtitle "Toward a New Psychology of Men and Women in Later Life." It was published by Basic Books, a pretty big, commercial house. The book was not widely reviewed, however, and never attained the status of a must-read classic even in its own field--gerontology--let alone social science in general. I think that's too bad.
Even though its subject matter was hardly in my own field, I read it anyway because I have long believed that one has to balance depth and width in one's reading about human society and culture if one is not to make foolish mistakes of narrowness and myopia. I read it probably in 1988 or 1989, when I had not yet turned 40 years old. Now I am on the other side of 59; and I read it again just this month. What a difference twenty years can make when it comes to understanding and appreciating a book, particularly when it is this book. When I read it the first time, I understood it intellectually, in my head, but I failed to feel it. I was too young. When I was 38, my three children were 8, 4 and 2, and my wife was still capable of bearing children. As you will see, this matters.
So what, basically, did Gutmann argue? He argued that, contrary to common conceptions, when people reach a post-parental age they do not hurtle toward decline and death in a catastrophic spiral, but rather acquire new capacities to discern and act. There is developmental growth in the third third of life just as there is in the first and second thirds. He argues further that this is not culture-bound, but universal. It is organic, biological in the individual because the social character of the species has made it so through the slow but steady and inexorable exertions of evolution. These powers of the third third of life are functional in evolutionary terms, in other words; that's why they exist: They have been selected for.
Gutmann apparently understood a long time ago that the infamous nature-nurture debate is a sterile, misleading miasma of ignorance. When one is dealing with an inherently social species, like all primate species, it is not an either/or proposition. Nurture, via culture, is not separate from "nature" but co-dependent with it. Human societies perform certain functions via cultural constructs that are species-functional, and over time these functions shape societies' individual members. Groups of early humans who did not manage to create culture--shared, idealized understandings of forces acknowledged to be loose in the world--were at a severe survival disadvantage and in fact did not survive or did so only at the margins. Hence the recent argument by Nicholas Wade, for example, that religion exists today because it was species functional: By advancing culture it advanced cooperation and morale, hence providing advantages to the groups that developed it to higher levels than other groups. Anyway.....back to Gutmann.
Now what, specifically, is the evolutionary purpose of third-third of life developmentalism? It has to do with parenting. Gutmann argues that humans make a basic trade-off: Because our babies are born stupid and helpless, parenting (what Gutmann calls the parental emergency) takes longer and requires more sacrifice than it does in other species. But it pays off because, over the long run, relying on the development of the neocortex to produce new learning is much more effective an evolutionary strategy than relying on habitual, instinctual old learning, as in most animals.
Gutmann argues that effective human parenting is inherently difficult, however, for it must provide not only physical but also emotional security for the psychologically malleable child. Parents need help in coping with their protracted burdens, and with the personal sacrifices they must made to meet them. They get this help, he argues, in two ways: women get the help they need via the extended family in traditional folk cultures, and men get the help they need through the vehicle of culture.
The extended family helps women to sublimate their capacity for aggression, and culture helps men sublimate their longing for autonomy. Key to both are grandparents, or what Gutmann calls emeritus parents. Grandparents not only teach their own children how to be parents when instruction is required, but they reinforce the larger structures--extended family and culture (mainly religion)--that help buffer the extraordinary demands of parenting. This transgenerational conception of parenting animals who depend on the new learning of the neocortex allows Gutmann to state: "We do not have elders because we have a human gift and modern capacity for keeping people alive; instead, we are human because we have elders."
More than that, Gutmann argues, psychiatrist that he is, male and female children are socialized differently as they practice up, so to speak, for their roles as mothers and fathers. This development, like all human development, goes through three stages: surgent, active and sculpted. Girls lose their "tom-boy" aggressiveness, their future-oriented instrumental capacities and turn inward to hearth and home. They become gentle and more docile. Boys learn to live at the perimeter, the dangerous outskirts of the village; they become aggressive protectors of the inside. As parents, they continue these roles in active and then sculpted, institutionalized ways that, while they vary in appearance from culture to culture, are universal in the critical function they perform. Females becoming nurturing mothers, fathers warrior protectors of their wives and children.
Ah, but when kids grow up and leave the nest and the post-parental phase of life dawns, these tendencies are reversed. Men gradually become more withdrawn, gentle and passive, more present than future oriented. They regain the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. Woman, on the other hand, because more assertive, more aggressive, more outward- and future-looking, also regaining the part of themselves they muffled during the parental emergency. In a sense, in older life men and women exchange roles, but as they do they gain, or regain, abilities to see and understand that make them ideal grandparents and pillars of the larger society.
Reclaimed Powers is a serious, social science book, with field-work-derived data explained in it. It most likely won't serve you well as a beach book in the weeks and months ahead. If you want to understand the data Gutmann draws on and how he draws on it, and if you want to go beyond the bare summary of his argument I provide here, you'll have to read the book. But you must know that in describing the new developmental capacities of the third third of life Gutmann also draws on ethnography and folklore in a most charming and illuminating way. Just about every culture, he points out, tells stories of strong older women--whether as scary witches and demons in the afterlife, or as priestesses, sexy nymphs and the like. There are also universal folk tropes that describe the occult, mystical powers of "strange" old men. Gutmann doesn't quite make this point explicit, but I will make it for him: Young men are creatures of the spacial frontier, out on the perimeter protecting the village or raiding other villages. Old men are also out on the frontier, but the frontier of time, not space. Gutmann beautifully describes the pre-literate mind as being all about boundaries, and of course this is confirmed brilliantly in the work of the late Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger, 1966, in particular).
The universality of these cultural representations, Gutmann says, proves how deep these tacit social understandings go, and shows that they are species-wide and evolutionarily driven. It can't be just coincidence that so many pre-literate cultures with no contact among them all hatch images of old men and old women that are discernibly, typologically so similar. How can it be that just about every traditional society, for example, has the figure of the matriarch, the assertive older woman, who owns the key to the pantry and acts through her eldest son--and terrorizes his wife, her daughter-in-law--to wield social power? This is no coincidence, though I suspect someone intimately familiar with endogamous Pashtun or Arab societies would have an easier time recognizing these idealized characters than most modern Westerners.
The most interesting part of the book is in some ways the least developed. But this is not Gutmann's fault. He had to present his methodology and his data, as all social scientists must, and like a good social scientist he was reluctant to go too far beyond where his data allowed. Speculation is fine, to a point; yet I find Gutmann's end-of-book speculations ripe for further thought and development. (So I asked him, now 85 years old, to do that, and he has agreed to do it in The American Interest; I look forward to this.) So let me characterize these speculations.
First, since Gutmann insists that the capacities of the third-third of life are species-engrained, he wants to know what happens when those surgent urges no longer have the psychosocial "space" of the traditional folk society in which to play out. What happens when there is no village housing the extended family, so that the surgent may become active and then sculpted within the social matrix? What happens when the historically natural kin-contiguity of the three-generational family falls to the nuclear family and the community-sundering mobility of modern societies? What happens when religion is no longer at the center of culture? What happens in secular cities to the active developmentalism of the third third of life? Does it still get sculpted into institutional form, or does it wither, become displaced or distorted?
Without going into detail, Gutmann argues that in those circumstances--most characteristically defined by secular cities--in which there is no outlet, no psychosocial space for the role of emeritus parents, older people, especially men, tend to lose a sense of purpose, to lose their sense of dignity and, rather too often, their sanity. Gutmann, it is fair to say (though he is not explicit on the point), sees dementia as a more complex ailment than does a conventional gerontologist--as a social condition of the soul as much as an individual condition of the body. But he goes further: He argues that in societies where elders cannot play the role for which evolution has shaped them, children suffer too--indeed, everybody suffers. Here it is worth quoting Gutmann at some length:
...the "natural" form of human governance. . . is gerontocracy: matriarchy for the extended family, elder patriarchy for the more public and ritual side of traditional folk life. . . . [C]ulture is a system of shared understandings: of what is good and bad, possible and impossible, thinkable and unthinkable. . . . A culture is a system of idealized understandings. Ultimately, culture is what you will die for, or what you will willingly send your sons to die for. It is this idealized and enduring aspect of culture that older men represent, making it real for themselves and their people. More specifically, older men are best equipped to identify themselves with the founding or origin myths of their culture.. . .Culture is the unique meaning of an otherwise ordinary society.
What Gutmann is doing here is establishing the links between the role of male gerontocracy, religion and the capacity for culture in a society. No old men in positions of respect and religious dignity, he essentially says, no culture--no shared sense of social origins and understandings. Culture has to be sacralized, one way or another, to be effective. He goes on:
Via the elders, the mythic past and the mundane present are interpenetrated, and the climate of mythic origins is brought forward, into the here and now. . . .The traditional older man, by tending culture, serves society as much as he is served by it. He preserves culture by making its mythic armatures real and available for the larger group. Older men thereby help to provoke the experiences upon which social bonds are based: experiences of automatic familiarity, of common membership in a unique collectivity. For when separate individuals hold the same ideas, they become familiars to each other, automatic comrades, even though they are not directly known to each other.
What happens in secular cities? We see examples not, says Gutmann, of changed cultures but of no, or less, culture. There are fewer shared understandings. There is no sacralized means of producing common ideals except--Heaven forbid--politics. Modernization and urbanization, for various reasons the book explains, erode the conditions under which gerontocracy can perform its age-old functions for society. We are deculturized. Despite the psychiatric language, you will get the idea:
When urban culture loses its power to bind and transform narcissism in all age groups to the collective weal, egocentricity increasingly becomes the general coinage of social relations. The aged, who depend on the goodwill and the inner control of younger, stronger individuals, as well as on external controls that are maintained by a strong cultural consensus, suffer accordingly.
In other words, the phrase "urban jungle" is not just a metaphor. Despite the apparent thickness of civilization in an urban environment, in a deculturized city individuals are limited by fewer, not more, social constraints.
Deculturation has broad social implications. Gutmann argues that the egalitarian ideal can eventually bring about consequences that destroy the founding culture--and here Gutmann echoes somewhat some of the arguments of Daniel Bell and others in describing the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The impulse to equality, he says, which first aimed to end restrictions on ordinary human rights, "ends by politicizing the complaint against existential restrictions." The result is that values are no longer thought of as objective, or as having a validity outside of the moment. "In recent times," said Gutmann,
the process of value formation has been democratized, taken out of the institutional province and given over to the individual. Moving thus, from the social to the personal sphere, values lose their shared and objective character, to become private and subjective. In effect, we have democratized and relativized the process of value formation to the point where each citizen is conceded the right to decide personally what values should be and by what standards the individual should be judged. Outside of a courtroom, the assertion 'I'm just doing my own thing,' comes to be the ultimate justification for any kind of behavior.
Gutmann then describes the congealing potential of strong culture--where a great deal is shared among members of a society--and contrasts it with those not of a different but of a weak culture. Under conditions of deculturation,
narcissistic preference dictates lines of affiliation. I can extent the awareness of familiarity and selfness only to those who are like me in the most concrete, asocial, immediately sensible respects; those who share my skin color, the same body conformation, the same genitalia, the same sexual appetites, and the same age group as myself. In effect, with deculturation, the principles of association are no longer based on shared standards but instead become racist, ageist, sexist and homoerotic.
In short, more "progressive", individualist "culture" actually sets the stage for a far less liberal society. Of course we already know that the postmodernist emphasis on "narratives" in which only women can understand women, whites whites, blacks blacks, gays gays and so on resembles nothing more than the racial "essences" theory of fascism. So Gutmann's observation should not surprise us. Indeed, we should be able to see that the relativization and democratization of value production has not led to a more tolerant society; it has led rather to a more atomized one. We have not replaced an intolerant, narrowly defined culture with a wider, more tolerant one; we have replaced it with less culture altogether. We have reduced what we hold in common, and so forced ourselves back onto narrower bands of consanguinity. We are thus almost all now hyphenated Americans as a result. That is how people speak and think in these recent decades, especially in our cities, and now you can see why. Still don't believe it? Walk though any American center city area with your eyes wide open, and you will believe.
Gutmann also is able to explain why the dethronement of the elders leads to a rash of social maladies far beyond the pale of gerontology:
Because they are no longer legitimated by some sacred principle, cultural rules themselves come to be regarded as restrictions, as arbitrary games, rather than as routes to power, personal significance, and self-esteem. Soon enough it becomes apparent, particularly to the young, that honor and conformity are incompatible, and that power is to be gained through antisocial rather than prosocial acts. As the rebel and psychopath acquire glamour, the social order, which depends on automatic trust among strangers, is increasingly compromised.
The aged suffer particularly from this as they lose their special developmental milieus, their special bases for self-esteem, and their traditional character as hero, taking on their modern character, as victim, instead. But it is not only the aged who suffer. The revolution against gerontocracy, Gutmann points out,
intended to liberate the young, ends by putting children at risk. The two great social structures, extended family and culture, that protect and generate strong elders, are precisely those that protect human parenting and underwrite healthy children. By providing meanings that compensate for deprivation, culture helps make the human family and adequate human parenting possible. Given a strong culture, young adults will routinely, even cheerfully, enter into the chronic emergency of parenthood. . . . But as culture loses the capacity to endow deprivation with significance, children . . .are among the first to suffer from the primary narcissism and aggression, released by deculturation, that the elders once helped hold in check. . . . [T]he unsupported, isolate nuclear family no longer remains a staging ground for child development, but instead too often becomes the setting for child abuse, physical as well as emotional.
I think there may be implications to Gutmann's analysis that he himself does not cite. For example, many scholars have argued that the inability of modern secular and highly urbanized societies to reproduce themselves, and so fall into demographic crisis, is related to the economics of raising children, about which William McNeill has written so brilliantly. But the freakonomics fad notwithstanding, economics is not, as usual, capable of fashioning a whole explanation for any broadly social phenomenon: Parenting in current circumstances in the secular West is not only expensive, it is very difficult and even dangerous when attempted by the socially and culturally unbuffered nuclear family. And so Gutmann is able to conclude, "When the elders are diminished, much of our common life is eventually diminished with them. And as undisguised narcissism tends increasingly to become the coinage of social relations, all unproductive, dependent cohorts--children, the handicapped, the aged--are put at risk. . . . Geronticide and infanticide, elder abuse and child abuse, predict to each other across societies."
Of course they do; and humans have tended not to like either form of murder, which may well be one reason our distant ancestors favored farming villages over hunter-gatherer existence, because the former did not require abandoning the very old, the very young and the weak. And now we can understand better why Abraham Joshua Heschel used to insist that one judge any society by how it treats its very old and its very young, because he too realized that these were inextricably linked.
Let's end now with one last remark from Gutmann, after which he will have earned a well-deserved rest from speaking:
Ultimately, children are the major victims of the indulgent, revisionist, relativistic games that we play with our culture. . . . In our haste to be modern, in our revolutionary rage against tradition and gerontocracy, we have brought down the fathers and humbled the aged. In so doing, we are also bringing down the culture that sustains us all.
Again, I think the potential to speculate beyond Gutmann's last sentence back in 1989 is irresistible. What, specifically, might the signs of a culture brought down be?
Why do we have a society in America that undervalues thrift and savings, and a set of financial and economic elites prone to generate chaos because they have forgotten the difference between getting rich and producing wealth?
Why do we have such astronomically high divorce rates and populations of single-dwellers? Why more broadly do affluence and loneliness walk hand in hand, giving rise as they go to our substance abuse contagion? Why do so many people, again primarily urban dwellers, seem unable to delay the gratification of any desire and so give rise to legions of otherwise decent people who can imagine abortion as a form of casual birth control?
Why can we not, in an age that claims to be environmentally aware, take inter-generational responsibility seriously--just look at the deficit and national debt? Why can we not resist the urge to marketize any gadget or gimmick no matter how little we have thought about the consequences?
Could it be that we have shattered the transmission belt by which basic values are passed down in sharable form in our society, severed that gossamer thread of memory which preserves what we have learned over the generations? Indeed, have we fallen big time for the biggest con there is--indulgence masquerading in the garb of personal "liberation"? Have the baby-boomers perhaps failed ever to grow up? Are they stalled in a kind of permanent adolescence, the most selfish and clueless generation in American history?
I am still a big Dylan fan, but I have to note that we were once told that "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and also not to trust anyone over 30. Well, the times have indeed changed, and now we can hardly trust anyone at all. Go find a sad old man and do something to make him happy, to respect his dignity. You'll feel better, too.
Monday, March 29, 2010
An Eroding Benefit of the Doubt
As those who have been reading this blog since it debuted about 14 months ago know, I sort of like President Obama, saw some positive qualities in him, have wished him and his Administration well, and given him the benefit of the doubt from starters' blues and other pratfalls of a Presidential first year. I still wish him well, but the benefit of my doubt is fast eroding. My sense overall now is that this is a smart man who nonetheless doesn't know very much and so repeatedly makes bad judgments. I see a pattern here, and I don't like it.
Before listing the main examples of his poor judgment so far, I want to take a moment to explain what judgment is in politics. The way I see it, there are four stages in the policy process. People who've never been in the government seem to think they all amount to more or less the same thing, but that's just not so.
The first stage is analysis: How does one define a problem and how does one understand it.
The second stage is prioritization: Based on the analysis of what's wrong, what needs fixing first, second, and so on. You can't do everything at once even if politics lets you, and it rarely lets you, so you have to choose.
The third stage is policy formulation: Once you know what you want to do, you have to plot a way to do it. This is NOT the same at all as stage two, and this is what outsiders to government tend most often to misunderstand. Once you have defined a goal, you have to assign the task, organize it, and budget for it. This will almost always involve a fair number of people in different parts of government. Anyone who thinks this sort of thing somehow just takes care of itself is very naive.
The fourth stage is policy implementation. Once you have all the people organized and pointed in the same direction, you have to actually do what you plan to do until the outcome you seek is achieved. Again, this does not happen automatically because reality can be recalcitrant. Stuff happens. Others react, and you have to adjust, push, pull, bend and otherwise see your policy through. (This is what the Bush Administration was especially bad at.)
In my view, the Obama Administration seems to be messing up at very basic stages one and two. Here are a few examples, and I will keep it brief, since I intend to elaborate in future posts.
First, let's talk about health care and domestic policy.
The first major policy initiative the Administration should have taken on was not about health care. Health care was going to be hard from the start. It is large, it is encrusted with lobbies and special interests, it is very complex and people disagree sharply about it. That was obvious a year ago and more. The Administration should have focused on energy. Today there is less disagreement on energy policy than there used to be; whether one is a conservationist, a politicized environmentalist, a national security expert or whatever, everyone wants to do more or less the same things in energy policy. It would have been wise to have had an energy bill before Copenhagen. It would have been wise to start with something on which a victory would not have taken more than a year, just to get these newbies' feet wet. It would have conduced to a more bipartisan atmosphere, too. But no: These guys made the same mistake the Clinton Administration made (also with health care), and the Carter Administration (with energy, ironically) before them: Starting out with the hardest thing, failing to do it right, and losing political momentum and capital instead of gaining it as a result.
If anyone had asked me, I'd have said, "Start with energy, and focus on innovation and job-creation within that area." Of course the Administration had to focus on the economy, and it did; but it did not stay focused. Financial reform has lagged and its creative swath has been diminished over time by lobbies because the White House was obsessed with health care. Is this an example of blindness caused by ideology? The ideology of redistributive justice for the poor? Could be.
Ah, but you say, Obama succeeded with health care in the end, did he not? No, he didn't. He got a bill passed, yes, but it is simply wrong to call it a health care bill. It is not about health care; it does not even address the reasons for the rising costs, inefficiencies and perverse incentives in the health care system. The bill that passed is only about the insurance aspect of the system. And it is a bad bill, and a disingenuous one as it has been "explained" to the nation. I am glad it passed anyway, or which more in a moment, but, as I have said, this bill does nothing about the real issues: the for-profit structure of most of the system; the technological dynamism that is the main reason for rising costs; the twin monsters of tort disfigurement and defensive medicine that spends wildly disproportionate sums on old people who are not going to get well; the costs of medical education and re-education; and I could go on. All this bill does is make larger an inefficient system. I don't care what the CBO says: This bill will not prove budget friendly or even budget neutral, not least because most of the things that have to happen to make it budget friendly are extremely unlikely to happen--and every honest person knows that. And certainly private expenditures on medical care will rise as long as nothing is done to cap the real causes of cost increases, and that means insurance costs will rise all around too. The bill also makes doing business more expensive for the insurance companies (whether justifiably or not is not the issue for the moment), and anyone who believes that they will not find some way to pass along those costs to consumers is a nitwit. And those who think the bill is just great because it taxes tanning salons and obligates employers to make room for nursing mothers and forces fast-food joints to reveal the contents of the crap they serve--well, that's all very nice but it doesn't amount to hill of turds in the larger scope of things.
So the Administration chose the wrong issue to start with, and it chose the wrong part of health care to start with as well. I think this was bad judgment based on bad analysis.
As I said, I am still glad the bill passed -- and now I will detour to explain why.
It is because, for one thing, in this country we pretty much never solve any problem with one bill. Now we've shaken things up at least a little, and maybe five bills and a decade from now we'll have made some progress. Maybe. A good sign is that the Republicans are not saying they want the status quo ante but something better. That's a good sign.
As important, there is an ideological and dare I say it, moral aspect, to this issue--and here I share the President's view--if I'm right about what it is.
We have a still-undeveloped social idea in the United States, a legacy of how the nation formed from immigrants on a large continent. But that social idea has been growing, little by little, and of course the civil rights movement was the big event in that regard in the second half of the past century. We as a nation increasingly care about basic fairness for all American citizens, and that's a good thing; that's the sound of our social idea building. And now, finally, for reasons I won't go into for reasons of space, the concept of fairness has been applied to health care.
How did this happen? Partly it has been a matter of spectacle. There has long been something profoundly unjust, as well as inefficient, about the availability of decent health care in this country, especially for children. But what changed is that the insurance companies have been especially stupid lately in their sheer venality and cruelty. No one in the political class in this country, or almost no one, really cares about poor people. But the insurance companies were stupid enough to fuck with middle class people who know how to make a racket, i.e., who are not silenced by the collective action problem. The complaints and outrages of a couple dozen middle class cases made more difference politically than the continuous shafting of genuinely disadvantages people. And the companies did not plan on Barack Obama being elected President. Unlike Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he actually cares about poor people and about basic fairness.
Americans are not born on a level playing field still. That's just the way it is, and Obama knows this. In my view, government's job in a truly liberal vision (not leftist vision) is to create a level playing field for basics -- education, health/nutrition, public safety. It is not to tilt the field toward anyone, whether toward the poor as a form of reparations, or toward the rich in all the entitlements and corporate subsidies we put up with. This is the now-obsolete liberal vision of Teddy Roosevelt and William Allen White, the way "liberal" was defined between around the end of the 19th century through to the New Deal. It is the kind of domestic policy liberal I am. I think that as an effort to level the playing field in basic health care, the bill helps to build our social idea. It tells our poor that society does care about them; that they are part of this nation, too, and deserve to be treated fairly.
And I have to say it: The Tea Party types who are shouting "socialist" at this White House are really saying, rather a lot of them anyway, that we don't give a shit about poor people, they are not part of "my" America, not part of "my" in-group. A lot of this is just ethno-chauvinist selfishness, adorned with not a little bigotry.
Of course, not all of them see things this way. In their simple-minded world, they think there IS a level playing field because, as true Enlightenment-deluded Americans, they believe in primordial individualism. If someone is poor and can't afford health insurance for themselves and their children, it's because, the Tea Partiers believe, they don't have good values: no work ethic, no sense of provenance, no ability to delay gratification, no sense of inter-generational responsibility. From a strictly sociological point of view, a lot of poor people in fact do lack these values, but it's not because they're morally inferior to those who have them. It's because, for the most part, they have been born into social matrices that have made it hard to impossible to acquire them. There's no level playing field in the critical, defining social context of family, extended family and community. And blindness of this among those who are railing against the Administration and this bill is what, in my view, a Republican makes. This is why I have never been and can never be a Republican, though I have worked on the foreign policy side of a Republican Administration. Their basic analysis of what is wrong, is wrong. The President's basic analysis of what is wrong in this regard is right; it's just that, unfortunately, all his other judgments are wrong. He is not, I think, a level-playing field liberal like me. He is a tilt-the-playing field, de facto pro-reparations left-liberal, all dressed up in a pettyfoggery of legalisms. I think he is, anyway. Not my cup of meat, as I have tried to make clear, but still better than a Tea-Party Republican.
Now let's look at bad judgments in foreign policy. There is so much to discuss; one hardly knows where to start. So let's start with the Jews.
Obama shows every sign of being Jewcentric. He seems to think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to all issues in the region, and the Palestinian issue the center of the center. He believes in linkage (as does, it seems, Jim Jones, his NSA). And he is mainly wrong; his analysis is in error, and so his priorities are wrong. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not the center of the universe, or even of the Middle East. Most Arabs who are not Palestinians do not give a practical shit, only an abstract one, about the Palestinians, whom they have taken turns abusing for the past half century. And the idea that Israeli settlements are at the center of the center of the center is also wrong.
So what does Obama do, with the help of his Jewcentric Jewish friends Emanuel and Axelrod, he goes blundering into the Palestinian morass without understanding how it works, and gets burned. He makes things worse, throws things backwards. That we are even using the phrase proximity talks just shows how backwards this all is.
I thought they had learned a lesson, but apparently not: With the Biden trip affair, they did the same dumb thing again, and made it all worse again. They are now back to where they were: bashing the Jews, holding out engagement to the Iranians, and, as a result, scaring the feces out of the Saudis, Jordanians, Gulfies, Egyptians and so on. And over what? A housing project in East Jerusalem that, even by Palestinian standards, isn't a big deal. Everyone knows this neighborhood will remain part of Israel if there is ever a settlement.
The analysis here, of linkage, is wrong, and the priorities assigned, are as well. Iran and its weapons programs are the problem, and the regional audience is watching, knowing full well that great powers are essentially in the protection business. If you bash your friends and propitiate your enemies, whether in Iran or Syria or Lebanon, you will make your enemies bolder and your friends search for alternative cover. This is not a country-club tennis court kind of competition; this is the Middle East.
How on earth can an urban politician, from Chicago of all places, not understand this? Ideology perhaps, like the kind that seems to have persuaded Obama that the only justification for Israel is the Holocaust? What this man does not know about the Middle East seems pretty extensive.
Or let's take, finally, Russia and arms control. The problem we have with Russia is pretty complicated, to be sure. A lot of it happens to be our fault.
The Russians are in a surly historical mood. They lost an empire, and blame us for taking advantage of them. They don't think they lost the Cold War; they think, not without some justification, that they got rid of their damned Communists mostly themselves. They accepted a territorial settlement to the Cold War that put them in borders from back around the time of Catherine the Great. They were reconciled to losing Eastern Europe. Many if not most were even OK with losing the non-Russian Soviet space, but only so long as the West did not inhabit it de facto in an aggressive manner. So what did we do? We expanded NATO in their face, not once but three times, pushed the Partnership for Peace into Kazakhstan and promoted, the Russians think, anti-Russian color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. We kept telling the Russians that none of this was directed against them, when all our local partners made it only too clear by their body language, at the least, that oh yes it was.
What is at stake really is whether the Russian government accepts, or can be persuaded to accept explicitly, the post-Cold War territorial settlement of 1991. It is very much in the American interest that it does, and we are stupid to do things that lead them to want to overthrow it. Not all the Russians' surliness is caused by Western, and U.S. policy, of course. They are capable of being thuggish without our help. But why help them?! We, with our EU friends, have a choice to make: We can privilege the maintenance of the 1991 territorial settlement with Russia, or we can privilege a political crusade in former Soviet space that will jeopardize that settlement. There is an argument to be made for both options; but as a realist, I prefer the former. But I at least know it's a choice.
The Obama Administration, I hope, sees things the same way, and I have some reason to think it does--though with Joe Biden aboard, a man who seemed to want to invite Georgia into NATO while Russians troops were invading it, one doesn't know what to think. But to use arms control as a vanguard issue here makes no sense to me. That does not link to anything, and linkage is what we need. The grand deal with Russia right now is pretty clear: You help with Iran (in a serious way, not just words) and in Afghanistan, and also agree no more violence against Georgia and subversion in Ukraine, whether over Crimea or anything else, and we'll back off from around your periphery. We will not militarize our pledges to the new NATO allies, and we will not interfere in the Caucasus or with your energy pipeline plans. If you want something serious from the Russians, you have to put up a serious stake to get it. We seem to want and want and want, but not ever understand what it is that's important to them. So sure they're going to fuck with us every chance they get. Why not? I really don't blame them in a way, even though, of course, I wish they wouldn't do it.
Mr. President: It's energy and the economy, not health care; it's technology and organization, not insurance, within health care; it's Iran and company, not Israelis and Palestinians, and within the latter it's philosophical rejectionism and incitement, not settlements; it's the post-Cold War territorial settlement with Russia, not arms control rituals; and, by the way, it's the real future of the WMD programs in Iran and North Korea, not the mostly pointless NPT Review conference in May; and so on and on and on. The analysis is wrong at each and every point, so the judgments about priorities and policies are wrong, too. Sorry Barack; it's just too much accumulating evidence now; the pattern is too clear. No more benefit of the doubt. My good wishes have now to be earned. Please don't let me down.
Before listing the main examples of his poor judgment so far, I want to take a moment to explain what judgment is in politics. The way I see it, there are four stages in the policy process. People who've never been in the government seem to think they all amount to more or less the same thing, but that's just not so.
The first stage is analysis: How does one define a problem and how does one understand it.
The second stage is prioritization: Based on the analysis of what's wrong, what needs fixing first, second, and so on. You can't do everything at once even if politics lets you, and it rarely lets you, so you have to choose.
The third stage is policy formulation: Once you know what you want to do, you have to plot a way to do it. This is NOT the same at all as stage two, and this is what outsiders to government tend most often to misunderstand. Once you have defined a goal, you have to assign the task, organize it, and budget for it. This will almost always involve a fair number of people in different parts of government. Anyone who thinks this sort of thing somehow just takes care of itself is very naive.
The fourth stage is policy implementation. Once you have all the people organized and pointed in the same direction, you have to actually do what you plan to do until the outcome you seek is achieved. Again, this does not happen automatically because reality can be recalcitrant. Stuff happens. Others react, and you have to adjust, push, pull, bend and otherwise see your policy through. (This is what the Bush Administration was especially bad at.)
In my view, the Obama Administration seems to be messing up at very basic stages one and two. Here are a few examples, and I will keep it brief, since I intend to elaborate in future posts.
First, let's talk about health care and domestic policy.
The first major policy initiative the Administration should have taken on was not about health care. Health care was going to be hard from the start. It is large, it is encrusted with lobbies and special interests, it is very complex and people disagree sharply about it. That was obvious a year ago and more. The Administration should have focused on energy. Today there is less disagreement on energy policy than there used to be; whether one is a conservationist, a politicized environmentalist, a national security expert or whatever, everyone wants to do more or less the same things in energy policy. It would have been wise to have had an energy bill before Copenhagen. It would have been wise to start with something on which a victory would not have taken more than a year, just to get these newbies' feet wet. It would have conduced to a more bipartisan atmosphere, too. But no: These guys made the same mistake the Clinton Administration made (also with health care), and the Carter Administration (with energy, ironically) before them: Starting out with the hardest thing, failing to do it right, and losing political momentum and capital instead of gaining it as a result.
If anyone had asked me, I'd have said, "Start with energy, and focus on innovation and job-creation within that area." Of course the Administration had to focus on the economy, and it did; but it did not stay focused. Financial reform has lagged and its creative swath has been diminished over time by lobbies because the White House was obsessed with health care. Is this an example of blindness caused by ideology? The ideology of redistributive justice for the poor? Could be.
Ah, but you say, Obama succeeded with health care in the end, did he not? No, he didn't. He got a bill passed, yes, but it is simply wrong to call it a health care bill. It is not about health care; it does not even address the reasons for the rising costs, inefficiencies and perverse incentives in the health care system. The bill that passed is only about the insurance aspect of the system. And it is a bad bill, and a disingenuous one as it has been "explained" to the nation. I am glad it passed anyway, or which more in a moment, but, as I have said, this bill does nothing about the real issues: the for-profit structure of most of the system; the technological dynamism that is the main reason for rising costs; the twin monsters of tort disfigurement and defensive medicine that spends wildly disproportionate sums on old people who are not going to get well; the costs of medical education and re-education; and I could go on. All this bill does is make larger an inefficient system. I don't care what the CBO says: This bill will not prove budget friendly or even budget neutral, not least because most of the things that have to happen to make it budget friendly are extremely unlikely to happen--and every honest person knows that. And certainly private expenditures on medical care will rise as long as nothing is done to cap the real causes of cost increases, and that means insurance costs will rise all around too. The bill also makes doing business more expensive for the insurance companies (whether justifiably or not is not the issue for the moment), and anyone who believes that they will not find some way to pass along those costs to consumers is a nitwit. And those who think the bill is just great because it taxes tanning salons and obligates employers to make room for nursing mothers and forces fast-food joints to reveal the contents of the crap they serve--well, that's all very nice but it doesn't amount to hill of turds in the larger scope of things.
So the Administration chose the wrong issue to start with, and it chose the wrong part of health care to start with as well. I think this was bad judgment based on bad analysis.
As I said, I am still glad the bill passed -- and now I will detour to explain why.
It is because, for one thing, in this country we pretty much never solve any problem with one bill. Now we've shaken things up at least a little, and maybe five bills and a decade from now we'll have made some progress. Maybe. A good sign is that the Republicans are not saying they want the status quo ante but something better. That's a good sign.
As important, there is an ideological and dare I say it, moral aspect, to this issue--and here I share the President's view--if I'm right about what it is.
We have a still-undeveloped social idea in the United States, a legacy of how the nation formed from immigrants on a large continent. But that social idea has been growing, little by little, and of course the civil rights movement was the big event in that regard in the second half of the past century. We as a nation increasingly care about basic fairness for all American citizens, and that's a good thing; that's the sound of our social idea building. And now, finally, for reasons I won't go into for reasons of space, the concept of fairness has been applied to health care.
How did this happen? Partly it has been a matter of spectacle. There has long been something profoundly unjust, as well as inefficient, about the availability of decent health care in this country, especially for children. But what changed is that the insurance companies have been especially stupid lately in their sheer venality and cruelty. No one in the political class in this country, or almost no one, really cares about poor people. But the insurance companies were stupid enough to fuck with middle class people who know how to make a racket, i.e., who are not silenced by the collective action problem. The complaints and outrages of a couple dozen middle class cases made more difference politically than the continuous shafting of genuinely disadvantages people. And the companies did not plan on Barack Obama being elected President. Unlike Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he actually cares about poor people and about basic fairness.
Americans are not born on a level playing field still. That's just the way it is, and Obama knows this. In my view, government's job in a truly liberal vision (not leftist vision) is to create a level playing field for basics -- education, health/nutrition, public safety. It is not to tilt the field toward anyone, whether toward the poor as a form of reparations, or toward the rich in all the entitlements and corporate subsidies we put up with. This is the now-obsolete liberal vision of Teddy Roosevelt and William Allen White, the way "liberal" was defined between around the end of the 19th century through to the New Deal. It is the kind of domestic policy liberal I am. I think that as an effort to level the playing field in basic health care, the bill helps to build our social idea. It tells our poor that society does care about them; that they are part of this nation, too, and deserve to be treated fairly.
And I have to say it: The Tea Party types who are shouting "socialist" at this White House are really saying, rather a lot of them anyway, that we don't give a shit about poor people, they are not part of "my" America, not part of "my" in-group. A lot of this is just ethno-chauvinist selfishness, adorned with not a little bigotry.
Of course, not all of them see things this way. In their simple-minded world, they think there IS a level playing field because, as true Enlightenment-deluded Americans, they believe in primordial individualism. If someone is poor and can't afford health insurance for themselves and their children, it's because, the Tea Partiers believe, they don't have good values: no work ethic, no sense of provenance, no ability to delay gratification, no sense of inter-generational responsibility. From a strictly sociological point of view, a lot of poor people in fact do lack these values, but it's not because they're morally inferior to those who have them. It's because, for the most part, they have been born into social matrices that have made it hard to impossible to acquire them. There's no level playing field in the critical, defining social context of family, extended family and community. And blindness of this among those who are railing against the Administration and this bill is what, in my view, a Republican makes. This is why I have never been and can never be a Republican, though I have worked on the foreign policy side of a Republican Administration. Their basic analysis of what is wrong, is wrong. The President's basic analysis of what is wrong in this regard is right; it's just that, unfortunately, all his other judgments are wrong. He is not, I think, a level-playing field liberal like me. He is a tilt-the-playing field, de facto pro-reparations left-liberal, all dressed up in a pettyfoggery of legalisms. I think he is, anyway. Not my cup of meat, as I have tried to make clear, but still better than a Tea-Party Republican.
Now let's look at bad judgments in foreign policy. There is so much to discuss; one hardly knows where to start. So let's start with the Jews.
Obama shows every sign of being Jewcentric. He seems to think that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to all issues in the region, and the Palestinian issue the center of the center. He believes in linkage (as does, it seems, Jim Jones, his NSA). And he is mainly wrong; his analysis is in error, and so his priorities are wrong. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not the center of the universe, or even of the Middle East. Most Arabs who are not Palestinians do not give a practical shit, only an abstract one, about the Palestinians, whom they have taken turns abusing for the past half century. And the idea that Israeli settlements are at the center of the center of the center is also wrong.
So what does Obama do, with the help of his Jewcentric Jewish friends Emanuel and Axelrod, he goes blundering into the Palestinian morass without understanding how it works, and gets burned. He makes things worse, throws things backwards. That we are even using the phrase proximity talks just shows how backwards this all is.
I thought they had learned a lesson, but apparently not: With the Biden trip affair, they did the same dumb thing again, and made it all worse again. They are now back to where they were: bashing the Jews, holding out engagement to the Iranians, and, as a result, scaring the feces out of the Saudis, Jordanians, Gulfies, Egyptians and so on. And over what? A housing project in East Jerusalem that, even by Palestinian standards, isn't a big deal. Everyone knows this neighborhood will remain part of Israel if there is ever a settlement.
The analysis here, of linkage, is wrong, and the priorities assigned, are as well. Iran and its weapons programs are the problem, and the regional audience is watching, knowing full well that great powers are essentially in the protection business. If you bash your friends and propitiate your enemies, whether in Iran or Syria or Lebanon, you will make your enemies bolder and your friends search for alternative cover. This is not a country-club tennis court kind of competition; this is the Middle East.
How on earth can an urban politician, from Chicago of all places, not understand this? Ideology perhaps, like the kind that seems to have persuaded Obama that the only justification for Israel is the Holocaust? What this man does not know about the Middle East seems pretty extensive.
Or let's take, finally, Russia and arms control. The problem we have with Russia is pretty complicated, to be sure. A lot of it happens to be our fault.
The Russians are in a surly historical mood. They lost an empire, and blame us for taking advantage of them. They don't think they lost the Cold War; they think, not without some justification, that they got rid of their damned Communists mostly themselves. They accepted a territorial settlement to the Cold War that put them in borders from back around the time of Catherine the Great. They were reconciled to losing Eastern Europe. Many if not most were even OK with losing the non-Russian Soviet space, but only so long as the West did not inhabit it de facto in an aggressive manner. So what did we do? We expanded NATO in their face, not once but three times, pushed the Partnership for Peace into Kazakhstan and promoted, the Russians think, anti-Russian color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. We kept telling the Russians that none of this was directed against them, when all our local partners made it only too clear by their body language, at the least, that oh yes it was.
What is at stake really is whether the Russian government accepts, or can be persuaded to accept explicitly, the post-Cold War territorial settlement of 1991. It is very much in the American interest that it does, and we are stupid to do things that lead them to want to overthrow it. Not all the Russians' surliness is caused by Western, and U.S. policy, of course. They are capable of being thuggish without our help. But why help them?! We, with our EU friends, have a choice to make: We can privilege the maintenance of the 1991 territorial settlement with Russia, or we can privilege a political crusade in former Soviet space that will jeopardize that settlement. There is an argument to be made for both options; but as a realist, I prefer the former. But I at least know it's a choice.
The Obama Administration, I hope, sees things the same way, and I have some reason to think it does--though with Joe Biden aboard, a man who seemed to want to invite Georgia into NATO while Russians troops were invading it, one doesn't know what to think. But to use arms control as a vanguard issue here makes no sense to me. That does not link to anything, and linkage is what we need. The grand deal with Russia right now is pretty clear: You help with Iran (in a serious way, not just words) and in Afghanistan, and also agree no more violence against Georgia and subversion in Ukraine, whether over Crimea or anything else, and we'll back off from around your periphery. We will not militarize our pledges to the new NATO allies, and we will not interfere in the Caucasus or with your energy pipeline plans. If you want something serious from the Russians, you have to put up a serious stake to get it. We seem to want and want and want, but not ever understand what it is that's important to them. So sure they're going to fuck with us every chance they get. Why not? I really don't blame them in a way, even though, of course, I wish they wouldn't do it.
Mr. President: It's energy and the economy, not health care; it's technology and organization, not insurance, within health care; it's Iran and company, not Israelis and Palestinians, and within the latter it's philosophical rejectionism and incitement, not settlements; it's the post-Cold War territorial settlement with Russia, not arms control rituals; and, by the way, it's the real future of the WMD programs in Iran and North Korea, not the mostly pointless NPT Review conference in May; and so on and on and on. The analysis is wrong at each and every point, so the judgments about priorities and policies are wrong, too. Sorry Barack; it's just too much accumulating evidence now; the pattern is too clear. No more benefit of the doubt. My good wishes have now to be earned. Please don't let me down.
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