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Alphabet City
Tuesday, March 30, 2010, 12:44 PM

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Norman Podhoretz emerged from semi-retirement to express his approval for Sarah Palin. No, I don’t propose to revisit the Sarah, pro- and con- debate, which will remain sterile and tedious until she actually, like, runs for something (or not). But I do want to suggest a revision to Podohoretz’s interpretation of William F. Buckley’s of most famous and, I think, misunderstood remark: that he’d rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phonebook than the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT.

Now Podhoretz admits that what Buckley meant is not immediately clear. Neverthless, he, like almost everyone else, takes it as endorsement of populism. Better Joe the Plumber–or, perhaps, Al the Electrician–than Quincy Mather Winthrop, the Lowell Professor of 14th Century Central Asian Aesthetics. Well, maybe so. But the thing about the phonebook is that the people it lists are pretty randomly distributed. And 2000 is a lot a names, which could very well include a few of the good professor’s colleges in addition to a healthy majority of regular folks.

So it seems that Buckley was suggesting that it’s better to be governed by something like a representative sample of the population as whole than a guild of professors. Which is even more plausible than betting on the individual Al rather than the individual Quincy.  On the other hand, there’s likely to be a place in that sample for intellectuals, even if a smaller one than they often think they deserve.


Onwards! Ever Onwards!
Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 1:46 AM

Via Julian, I see that Yglesias has spun a narrative:

For the past 65-70 years—and especially for the past 30 years since the end of the civil rights argument—American politics has been dominated by controversy over the size and scope of the welfare state. Today, that argument is largely over with liberals having largely won.

…

The crux of the matter is that progressive efforts to expand the size of the welfare state are basically done.

This seems plausible, but I think I can spin an equally plausible narrative of my own:

Imagine, in a parallel universe if you prefer, that some of Yglesias’ ideological compatriots are driven not by wonkish numeracy, but rather by a deep-seated desire to abolish suffering. Like the War on Terror, the War on Suffering (declared June 1st, 2017) can never be won; but for this hardened, elite team of poverty-warriors, it must eternally be fought. More and more resources are tossed at the task, the cost/benefit ratio spirals higher and higher, but the grim band presses on, for press on it must, for to do any less would be to admit defeat.

One dark and stormy night, a happiness researcher knocks on the door of the Department of Pleasure: “Did you know that our metrics suggest that happiness is sometimes a function not of absolute wealth but of relative wealth? On the other hand…” ENOUGH! The staff at the Department of Pleasure (formed by the Providing America Tools for Hastening the Obliteration of Suffering Act of 2037) are uninterested in the effects of culture upon the human psyche or the dubious methodology underlying the findings. Somebody out there feels bad about the fact that his neighbor has more resources! So quick! To the Bat Cave! After many quests and trials, our triumphant heroes manage to rescue the Phoenix Sword from the Dragon King, and bring its enormous, equalizing, leveling forces to bear upon society. Finally, and at long last, we will have discovered happiness.

Pure speculation, I know, but is it so far from the mark? After all, as we know, “one is too many”.

Kidding aside, I’m not grokking the obvious footholds on this slippery slope. Is my read on the motivations flat-out wrong? It seems that much of the tradition of political philosophy from which modern advocates for the welfare state draw their sustenance has the abolition of suffering as its explicit goal. I wish I could be confident in Yglesias’ read of his movement, but I see no reason why, absent tactical considerations, they should be satisfied with Obamacare.


Whither the Post-Healthcare Realignment?
Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 1:02 AM

Over at Cato, Julian Sanchez has written a post about how the aftermath of healthcare reform could reveal faultlines in existing political coalitions and trigger realignment:

There’s no intrinsic commonality between, say, “left” positions on taxation, foreign policy, and reproductive rights—the label here doesn’t reflect an underlying ideological coherence so much as the contingent requirements of assembling a viable political coalition at a particular time and place.  If an issue that many members of one coalition considered especially morally urgent is, practically speaking, taken off the table, the shape of the coalitions going forward depends largely on the issues that rise to salience.

My excerpt doesn’t do justice, read the whole thing. I’ll revisit the last paragraph since it’s particularly important.

For now, however, let me point out that there are two broad ways of looking at the underlying motivations of political actors. The first view, one which I give little credence to, understands individuals as being motivated primarily by “issues”. That is, discrete views on a set of minimally overlapping topics to which we give greater or lesser importance in our internal rankings. This is certainly an accurate view when applied to certain subsets of the population. Professional lobbyists, for instance, are likely to have their activities driven by their views on a particular issue.

We generalize too easily beyond the subset for which this view is appropriate, however; and I suspect that this generalization is driven in part by the tools for measuring political attitudes that we have at our disposal. Polls tend to ask about issues, people respond to polls with statements about issues, and consequently we come to believe that issues predominate in general. This is not necessarily accurate.

A deeper investigation of political motives might reveal that issues are epiphenomena of worldviews — sometimes better and sometimes worse thought out, but always holistic, visions of what the ideal society would look like. Worldviews tend to be nebulous, they tend to be conveyed easily through imagery and poorly through scales that range from “Agree Strongly” to “Disagree Strongly”, and most of all they tend to resist discretization. I suspect that motivation based on worldview is overrepresented among professional political activists, think tank employees, and journalists.

So far so good, nothing I’ve said precludes realignment. It’s doubtless likely that many who support a particular contingent ideological ensemble share very different worldviews that happen only to align on key issues. What changes the picture is the fact that the political agenda is largely set by a self-selecting group of professional activists, think-tank workers, and journalists. Within this environment, pressure to be a “team-player” for your coalition is high. So too is the institutional inertia embodied by foundations, policy shops, and alliance umbrella-groups. Given this, one might expect the worldviews of the key players to undergo drift, to slowly mutate until they are more homogeneous and more compatible on all fronts. In fact, we see this occur quite frequently: one example is the labor movement, which for a long time was considered hostile to immigration, but which now is mostly in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. I suspect that this shift percolated down from the top, from the professional ranks of DC labor activists, who in turn underwent internal shifts in worldview due to the pressures exerted upon them by the contingent alliance in which they found themselves.

If this hypothesis is correct, we would expect political coalitions to be “stickier” than they would otherwise be. The fact that the Great Conservative Crack-Up that so many predicted after the fall of the USSR still hasn’t fully arrived might be considered evidence in favor of this hypothesis. One testable prediction might be that the rift between scientism and romanticism won’t immediately fracture the left after global warming ceases to be an issue.

What might melt the stickiness, however, is the systematic undermining of the intra-alliance power of the political professionals, as Julian describes:

…the possibility that I find interesting is that—against a background of technologies that have radically reduced the barriers to rapid, fluid, and distributed group formation and mobilization… They’ve already shown they’re capable of surprising alliances—think Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist.  … It’s entirely possible that there are latent and dispersed constituencies for policy change outside the bipartisan mainstream who have now, crucially, been connected: Any overlap on orthogonal value dimensions within or between the new groups won’t necessarily be evident until the relevant values are triggered by a high-visibility policy debate.

It seems like you need something else to make this claim: the assumption that all these cool, new, distributed advocacy groups don’t get sucked into the extant ideological groupings over time. So long as we have the two-party system, incentives to conform are high and tipping points are rare but dramatic.

As for the Hamsher/Norquist folie à deux, such things aren’t exactly unprecedented, nor are they only a product of the digital age. Recall Karl Hess, or perhaps Gus DiZerega, who in 196Z was president of his university chapters of both SDS and YAF. What did he do after that? Why, he blogs about Paganism of course.


Getting Me Wrong
Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 7:09 AM

Russell Arben Fox is unhappy:

Poulos’s ridiculous, Tea-Partier rhetoric about a bill that has been sent back and forth through the legislative wringer more times over the past year that the great majority of bills ever experience (how does ten months of constant debate and scrutiny add up to governing by “fiat”?) simply reveals him, beneath his philosophy, to be Mansfieldian at heart: someone so disbelieving that any kind of collective action or positive reforms can contribute to political liberty as to lead him to assume that anything which smacks of “reform” is by definition the undemocratic work of a Lawgiver, and therefore sees the “process” behind such as invalidating any and all claims that might be made on behalf of, for instance, insuring people, and regulating insurers, and maybe even lowering costs.

Leaving Harvey Mansfield out of this, I am stumped as to where this ungenerous read came from. My post certainly did not claim that Obama was impatient or unwilling to tolerate nuts and bolts negotiations at the Congressional level. Indeed, Obama, as I pointed out, was quite willing to let things get positively “ugly” as the Congress wrestled with, and wrestled over, the monster bill. That’s because he seems not to care how ugly it gets because only the result counts, and the result that counts is the law he wants. Buyoffs, backroom deals, sops to the insurance companies he demonizes — whatever works.

I doubt any of my regular readers, right, left, or center, could possibly agree that I am the kind of conservative who stands reflexively against reform. Something — in what I took to be my obvious subtext — is occasionally better than nothing, and one of the purposes of a nondysfunctional politics is to adjudicate well when that’s so and when it isn’t. My point, which I believe stands, is that this bill is not something that is better than nothing, and that elevating the something-over-nothing idea to the level of a guiding legal philosophy is a triumph of dangerous abstraction over — yes — the viability of real, responsible reform.

As far as communitarian conservatism goes, I am one of the most sympathetic non-communitarian conservatives I know, so this dispute seems especially unfortunate. But the basis of my sympathy is rooted in my appreciation for the possibility of bottom-up change, on a micro, pluralistic level, in the way many Americans live their lives. Some top-down change is inevitable, and some is necessary and even good — I’m sympathetic to David Brooks, too, remember — but Obamacare is not change I can believe in, and it is not better than nothing. I say this, of course, as a person who shares the near-universal opinion of intelligent Americans everywhere, which is that we have to do something. I also share the opinion of the relatively few conservative commentators who rue the failure of Republicans in Congress, especially in the Bush Congress, to effectively tap into their own idea base and prioritize the promotion of a reform package of their own.


Berry Revisited
Monday, March 22, 2010, 6:45 PM

Apropos of my remarks below, a reader writes:

It seems to me that you’re taking his quote about the politicization out of context, first of all. He’s downright Aristotelian, it seems to me, in his conception of what politics is. What makes me say this is the role he sees marriage playing in the life of a community. It’s vital. It’s at the heart of it. And it forms the model, writ small, of what the polis ought to be, writ large. Only affection and love, mutual concern, generosity, forbearance: these alone can sustain politics. And, you’ll notice, these are vital for marriage. Now, Aristotle doesn’t say that. But he does talk about the relation of man and wife as a relation of equals, and as a kind of domestic polis.

So when he talks about marriage becoming political, he obviously does not mean political in this more edifying sense. He means it in the sense you indicate, that of competing rights claims, etc. He calls this kind of marriage “politics” in the lowest contemporary sense of the word. It’s about grasping, rather than giving. It’s about one-upsmanship rather than forgiveness. It’s about getting what I can, rather than giving all I can. And this is a picture, too, of the worst kind of politics.

Now, this kind of politics is, perhaps, all that is possible on our current grand scale. It’s obvious that Berry’s — and Aristotle’s — preferred kind of politics is only possible on smaller scales. And this, even as he contemplates the nature of “a public” versus “a community” in “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community.” The rules governing each of these is different. And it’s not the simple public/private divide.

Our Fair Share of Whirlwind
Monday, March 22, 2010, 6:54 AM

I was going to post something on the latest dreadful new census commercial, but this will serve us all pretty nicely.


Obama’s Legal Vision
Saturday, March 20, 2010, 9:17 AM

And now, my conclusion about where Obamacare falls into the law-versus-politics schema I mentioned, below, in the context of marriage and divorce. There was one real highlight and moment of clarity for me in Obama’s now-infamous Baier interview: the sequence where the President insisted that, because making the bill law was the right thing to do, he — and, presumably, the rest of us — could, in perfectly good conscience, dispense with the chore of considering whether whichever legislative process wound up making the bill law was wrong in any way. There was simply no remorse and no discomfort on this point. Because making law what the President wanted to make law was the right thing to do.

Now, it is clear that the moral force of mere health care reform is inadequate to power this sort of fixation. The system is broken, to be sure; but at least some honest commentators on both sides know and agree that this bill breaks the system further, by way of entrenching and extending its worst features, with one exception: a significant number of Americans without health insurance will get coverage. Nobody believes we would, or should, be unhappier if more Americans were able to pay their medical expenses. To pretend that this is the issue is to perpetrate a fraud. The practical issue is whether the experiences of our uninsured, once summed, constitute a moral problem so grave that all Americans face, and America itself faces, a non-negotiable moral obligation to insure them now, with this bill. Only if that is true will it be true that passing this bill is the right thing to do.

But we didn’t get from the President the kind of fervent moral passion on this point that a regular person, or even a pundit, might be forgiven for associating with one of the habitual or characteristic emotional states of Americans past and present. In some areas of governance — say, foreign policy — I actually believe this no-drama dispassion has served the President, and the rest of us, extraordinarily well, especially under the circumstances. And I suppose I’m relieved to an extent that Obama is not playing John Brown on health care reform.

But I’m distressed, to a more immediate and perhaps larger extent, by the way that the only possible moral justification for viewing the law of health care as utterly more significant than the politics of health care amounts to an intellectual footnote for the President. It seems to me that the President is actually operating on a much higher, grander, and, yes, troublesome level of moral abstraction. The central moral commitment or conviction that seems to be shining through Obama’s remarks on the supremacy of legal outcomes over political process is that legislating itself is a moral act — one which legislatures like ours seem incapable of performing properly. Precisely because our Congress is a complex representative system driven by actual political practice, it is too deformed and crippled to achieve legislative excellence. When we, or the President, places a demand upon our Congress to do so, things get — in the President’s word — “ugly.” By contrast, we are led to believe, fiat is beautiful.

I’m not going to bother with the radioactive trope of un-Americanism here. Long before Obama, fiat was hardwired at searing times into our national consciousness. Anyone who likes to trace our American political philosophy back to classical roots has got to admit that Plato leaves us uncertain at best about when legislative fiat is worse than the alternative. And there must be little doubt that the abstract ideal of legislation, in the western tradition, is the work of a single Lawgiver.

Charges of un-Americanism are beside the point, which is that a legal philosophy that views the power of the Lawgiver as a beautiful ideal and the authority of political practice as an ugly clutch of impediments to this ideal is a troublesome one. It is troublesome, perhaps most of all, because the beautiful ideal of the powerful Lawgiver is ill-suited to being realized in a country like ours — no matter whether that’s true because of ‘something in our collective DNA’ or because of ‘a concatenation of contingent circumstances’ or because of ‘our path-determined political history’ or anything else. In the United States of America, and real or imaginary countries like it, Obama’s moral philosophy of law can manifest only through an unwieldy, unaccountable, unmanageable, and often incompetent bureaucratic administrative apparatus — one which makes the unwieldy, unaccountable, unmanageable, and often incompetent legislative apparatus of our actual legislatures look, by comparison, like a model of administrative excellence.

In America, paradoxically, our messy political process of legislation, warts and all, loses to the Great Lawgiver in the legislative-excellence competition — while trouncing the agents upon which the Lawgiver must depend in the competition for excellence in governance.

The problem, of course, is that in this competition it is possible for nobody to win the gold medal. It is possible, in fact, for nobody to win at all. One side will simply lose more, and lose harder, than the other. That is the condition we seem to be plunging deeper and deeper into today. It is, in part, what David Brooks is getting at in talking about ‘the broken society’. What is most troublesome about Obama’s legal vision is that it strongly suggests the President does not understand this. “Something is better than nothing” — unless you think this is true because insuring uninsured Americans is so important as to be worth doing even through a bill as wretched, misbegotten, and irresponsible as this, it is not true. I’m concerned that President Obama thinks not only that it is true as a rule that something is better than nothing, but that it is a fundamental principle of legal philosophy, one that converges with morality itself, because bending the arc of history even a little bit toward the Lawgiver’s beautiful ideal is oftentimes the most, and the most heroic thing, we can do. This is incrementalism in the service of all too immodest ends, and in the case of this health care bill, it is a recipe from top to bottom for more governance, worse governance, and lots of it.


Resisting Hopey Changey
Friday, March 19, 2010, 12:07 PM

Porcher-in-chief, Dr. Pat Deneen has a rather interesting post related to the soon-to-be “passed” Obamacare legislation, designed to empower the central government, and the corresponding rise of the constitutional concept of “states’ rights” beloved by anti-federalists of every stripe and the Madison/Jefferson idea of “nullification” greatly improved upon by that South Carolina firebrand, John C. Calhoun here: http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2010/03/afoot/#comment-32035.

Also, we have this report:http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/10838 on the threatened lawsuits of thirty-seven states if the president’s “health care” legislation is passed.

How far this “states’ rights,” nullification, and tea party rising will go in their resistance to the central government remains to be seen. However, you’ve got to think that somewhere Bobby Lee and Jeff Davis are surely smiling.


Law and Marriage
Thursday, March 18, 2010, 1:56 PM

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. — Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry. I’d be plenty happy to see more Wendell Berrys in the world. But, sometimes, apparently slam-dunk comments like these wend their way up from Berry’s Gutenberg printing press to approving corners of the internet, and I have to pause for a moment. Because, as is the case here, I feel a bit of a reflex to be vigilant — the big picture seems so right so fast that the temptation is to stipulate the seemingly little things.

The marriage-as-politics bit, here, for instance, seems like a little thing — a ready-made analogy to ring around the neck of a longtime cultural corruption indicator that many of us still haven’t tired of bemoaning, and for good enough reason. But, actually, treating contemporary marriage in the manifestation Berry wants to critique as a “sort of private political system” does quite a bit, on closer inspection, to send us down what I think is a very false critical path — one that might even play into the hands of the forces we wish to array ourselves sharply against.

The assertion and defense of rights and interests, I have to venture to say, isn’t politics — not necessarily. You can find it, for instance, in one of the least political places on earth, the room where contractually required arbitrations are performed. Divorce court, perhaps above all, stands as a living monument to how tirelessly (and at what cost) we’ve worked to export the assertion and defense of rights and interests out of politics and into law. Increasingly, I think, law is being set up as an opposite to politics, an antipolitics — again, not because people don’t fight over what they think they are entitled to want and what they think they need, but because the way in which they do is supervised and managed by a system of rules and regulations promulgated in a way that itself is divorced from actual political practice.

The contestations over relational power that Berry sees as characterizing marriage today must not be confused, I think, with the kinds of contestations you get under conditions of actual political practice. This sort of conflation seems to me roughly similar to that involved in calling gladiators warriors, and gladiator matches war.

UPDATE: Peter Suderman reminds me that I should link to this depressing item. “The Marriage Ref” is, as far as I can tell, pretty final proof that our model of acrimonial marital arbitrage is far from political.


How Technology Really Threatens Liberalism
Sunday, March 14, 2010, 12:50 PM

Courtesy of Alan Jacobs, I see some academics are starting to grapple with the issue. But how successfully? Danah Boyd tackles Google Buzz:

“Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.”

Google got into trouble, she said, by linking something that people associate with being inherently private — their e-mail accounts — with something that is very public — status updates on a social network. The result was “a series of social disruptions,” Ms. Boyd said.

The blunder, she said, reflected a broader muddying of the line between what is private and public online. The idea that information exists in a binary world — public or private — no longer applies, she said.

“Google assumed people wanted different parts of their contacts converging and collapsing,” she said. “But just because people put different parts of their lives online doesn’t mean they want them in one place.”

More troubling, she said, is what Google’s flub may portend for the future.

“I can’t help noticing that more and more technology companies are exposing people’s information publicly and then backpedaling a few weeks out,” she said.

Ms. Boyd pointed to the recent changes in Facebook’s privacy policy that made more of its members’ information public by default. “Just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized,” she said.

The results could be harmful and damaging if they were to expose people’s information in ways they were not expecting, she said, and these issues are only likely to get more convoluted in the future.

“Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both,” she said.

Let’s be clear about the reason we are experiencing this convolution the way that we are: leading tech companies have a colossal financial interest in making people convolute public and private. Any interest in persuading people that it’s a good idea to deconstruct the public/private divide in their personal lives — or, really, to let them be deconstructed — is ancillary at best to that larger financial interest, and at worst antagonistic.

Excuses like those Boyd’s ominous remark seems to portend — “nothing we did was technologically wrong” — are easy enough of targets to aim at and hit. And I’m not one to pretend that a few big corporations are singlehandedly responsible for taking our precious public/private distinction and shattering it at the feet of a golden idol. The fact is, we democratic individuals have come to recognize that cultivating, maintaining, managing, and policing liberalism’s essential public/private distinction is a lot more and harder work than we might be willing to allocate our precious resources (time, energy) toward. What it requires in particular — at the porous frontier between what’s personal and what’s not — is, I think, a rather robust, regular, and adult form of citizen politics.

Unfortunately, we have a longing to escape from that sort of politics, even at the cost of a robust, regular, and paternalist form of state-administered law. The journey there, as I see it, is characterized by the awkward-turtle sort of line-drawing generated by decisions like Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Lawrence v. Texas – where concepts of publicity and privacy become increasingly meaningless under the pressure of putting the stamp of authoritative law upon a much different divide — between what I’ve called official and unofficial life.

The divide between official and unofficial puts some private and some public things in one basket, and others in another. Regardless of what a particular American citizen thinks about homosexuality, abortion, or exes lingering in electronic address books, this is a significant shift in our social and political order, and it ought to attract more attention, as such, than it has. The implications of a shift toward official/unofficial life, and away from public/private life, are profound. And they throw into stark relief, I think, some of the ways in which a more progressive life may quickly become less and less liberal.

I would point out that the essentially erotic interest Americans seem to have in abandoning the public/private distinction is a lot different from the essentially monetary interest some American corporations have in getting as many of us to do that as possible. Neither our changing mores nor our developing technology are making a mess of public and private so much as moving to replace them with new categories that leave the public/private distinction looking quaint, arbitrary, and incoherent. The trouble is that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are pushing in this direction without a clear enough understanding of how the ‘progressive’ aspect of our mores represents a contingent vanguard and not a historically destined popular movement.

Yet at the same time, our innovative geeks seem genuinely blindsided by the severity of the residual relationship problems that they have caused to come back and haunt Americans uncomfortably and improvisationally negotiating the space between disrupted public and private realms. This emotional tone-deafness seems to me all too typical of geekdom, a world in which the self-evident inherent goodness of new features blinds us to the disruptions they inflict on the human realities they depend on. As the least socially awkward among us have always already known, the ultimate stomping ground for those seeking the experience of new features is society itself, with its potential of endless relational couplings and decouplings. Historically, those of us looking to max out those kinds of experiences have been the bugs, not the features, of liberal society. Tech companies geeking out on the profitable possibilities of ever-more-social transactions, official and unofficial, fail to realize that they are working to crash liberal society. And because of this, backlash against their efforts to do so are met with an awkwardness and confusion almost as poignant as those of their customers who have suddenly been plunged back into relationships they thought had been safely quarantined, online no less than off, in the past.

UPDATE: For a sane debate among tech-education enthusiasts that might go at least one step outside the rut, see here (h/t PEG).

UPDATE 2: And for some further thoughts at a hopefully not too vertigo-inducing level of abstraction, see here.

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