Matt Zeitlin

Here are Lindsay Beyertein’s thoughts on Bush’s nominee World Bank President:

Longtime Bush loyalist Robert Zoellick will succeed Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank. Having learned nothing from the Wolfowitz fiasco, United States has used its considerable clout at the bank to appoint yet another intellectual architect of the Iraq war.

Zoellick served as Deputy Secretary of State until July 2006. (Recall that Wolfowitz’s girlfriend Shaha Riza received a highly unusual external assignment to the State Department as part of the lavish compensation package that Wolfowitz negotiated on her behalf.)

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Zoellick served as a foreign policy adviser to George W. Bush as a member of a group of neoconservative hawks known as the Vulcans. Zoellick may have resigned from Condi Rice’s State Department rather than answer questions a pre-9/11 meeting he attended during which Tenet warned Rice about the threat of Bin Laden.

Between MacNamara, Wolfowitz, and Zoellick, the World Bank has turned into a club fed for warmongers.

I guess Lindsey’s point is “necons need not apply for anything.” She fails to understand that Bush is still president and is likely to appoint people who are ideologically in sync with him. So we have a choice, managerially incompetent, pie in the sky utopian ideologues like Wolfowitz, or competent technocrats like Zoellick. Who exactly does Lindsay expect to be appointed, Robert Reich?

Lindsay could examine Zoellick’s relevant qualifications, he’s worked in both diplomacy and in finance/international economic matters nearly his entire career. He was the US Permanent Trade Representative, in the State Department and by all accounts wasn’t a total fuck up, which is about as good as it gets for the Bush administration. He doesn’t seem to have a purist’s contempt for bureaucracies and will probably be able to begin to fix the US’ relationship with the Bank. He also helped reunify Germany. He actually appears to enjoy working and negotiating with other international bureaucrats, as shown by his revival of the Doha round in 2004. But, to “progressives” like Lindsay, he supported the Iraq war and ipso facto is a bad candidate.

It is unclear how supporting the Iraq war really has anything to do with running the Bank. Lindsay refuses to put forth any critique or cast any aspersions on Zoellick’s experience, temperament or management abilities. Instead, we find out that he signed the PNAC letter, which appears to be turning into a Scarlet Letter for wannabe progressive demagogues. Yes, the Iraq war was a total fuck up, a disastrous policy, and the architects of it probably shouldn’t be trusted to formulate military policy anymore. But it is possible to be a competent, experienced administrator and still have supported the war in Iraq, maybe Lindsay didn’t know this, but the World Bank doesn’t have a military, it can’t invade any countries. Should we have never appointed Zalmay Khalizshad ambassador to Iraq because he’s a big time neocon, should we vociferously protest his being ambassador to the UN because of his policy preferences? Should we ignore that he has been one of the few competent Americans in Iraq, and that since Bush has the power to appoint the ambassador, we should make do with the best he gives us?

Lindsay also conflates “signer of the PNAC letter” with “intellectual architect for the Iraq war.” During his first four years of the administration (2001-2004), Zoellick was the US Permanent Trade Representative, which involves negotiating trade agreements and making trade policy with other countries. What it isn’t, however, is planning the Iraq War. Now, Zoellick may have been a Wolfowitz type had he been in the Defense Department those years, Lindsay might have a point, too bad Zoellick wasn’t. So, as much as he make like to, Lindsay can’t put all the sins of the Iraq War on Zoellick’s shoulders.

What made Wolfowitz such a bad choice was not his support for the Iraq War, per se, but his imperious attitude towards those at the Bank, who were looking for him to mess up, and since he had alienated them so badly, he had no support among his own staff and his position became untenable. There’s no indication that Zoellick shares any of the qualities that actually made Wolfowitz so bad.
Lindsay also shows a profound ignorance of Robert McNamara as a person and of his tenure as World Bank president. Yes, the policies he pursued during the Vietnam War probably qualify him as a war criminal, but after seeing Errol Morris excellent documentary, Fog of War, he seems to have been more of a civil servant who had to do his “best” to implement a radically imperfect policy. He was also firedfor promoting a troop freeze and as Fog of War shows, we should all wish he was SecDef during the Rumsfeld years. McNamara also has near genius levels of analytic and managerial intelligence, as shown by his non-Vietnam management of the DoD and his leadership at GM, which would seem to qualify him as World Bank president. It’s just unfortunate that his vast abilities and intelligence ended up being used to such tragic ends in Vietnam. McNamara was personally committed to pursuing development and alleviating poverty, it’s reproted he even cried while giving the annual report. But in Lindsay’s world, he’s just a “warmonger” and thus can’t have any genuine feelings or ability.

I think that the World Bank is a vastly imperfect institution, its unclear what its goals are and how it achieves them. The countries that haven’t followed the Bank’s plan for development have experienced the biggest reductions in poverty and have become the most developed. But that’s not an excuse to appoint incompetent ideologues like Wolfowitz. Zoellick is as good as we can get from a vastly imperfect administration, and it’s immature and unintelligent to turn the PNAC letter into a blacklist for all government jobs, no matter how irrelevant support for the Iraq war is to the actual position any signee is being appointed to.

PS – Drezner, Phillip Levy, NY Times all have positive takes on Levy

DeLong is more sceptical.

Via LGM, we have this story about A-Rod:

The setup: Yankees winning, 7-5, two out and two on, top of the ninth. Jorge Posada pops up to third. Howie Clark camps under it. Rodriguez trots by and yells “Ha!” (according to him). Clark thinks it’s the shortstop, John McDonald, calling for the ball. He backs off, the ball drops to the turf, the inning continues, and the Yankees score three more runs.

Now, before anything else, I HATE the Yankees. But, I hate baseball’s inane traditionalists more, so defend the Bronx Bombers I do. According to the Jays’ GM A-Rod’s quick thinking gamesmenship was “bush league.”  What again is so bad about playing within the rules to every possible advantage? The game was by no means over and the Jays’ third basemen shouldn’t have been so dumb as to be fooled by A-Rod’s simple ploy.  Bellyaching over superior gamesmenship and strategy is just so incredibly lame, if they’re not cheating, stop bitching and actually score some runs. Don’t complain just because A-Rod tries harder than the rest of your team to win.

Via Daniel Levy’s sweet new blog, Propects for Peace, comes this nytimes article, showing that in the midst of the Hamas-Fatah conflict in the Gaza and the violence in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, we have Al Qaeda type jihadists seeping in:

Palestinian authority, both in the Palestinian areas and in refugee camps in Lebanon and beyond, used to lie in the hands of Fatah, the nationalist faction once led by Yasir Arafat. But after the entry of militant Hamas into politics, its 2006 electoral defeat of Fatah and the battles between them, jihadi freelancers with murky links are filling a vacuum in Gaza and in the camps in Lebanon.

Now, Hamas has a pretty fundamentalist line on Islam and isn’t exactly overly friendly with Israel, so why should the emergence of more violent jihadists in Gaza particularly worry us? Well, Hamas, being a real political organization with constituents to keep happy can probably be pressured or negotiated with over some things, these murky jihadists…not so much. Hamas, however, is the group with the most to lose from the emergence of such groups, and probably could go into some sort of covert cooperation with the Israelis over trying to eliminate the jihadists in their midst. Levy puts it best:

al-Qaeda and Hamas are not the same thing and to lump them together makes not only for bad analysis, but also for bad policy – plus, the kind of political Islamic movements represented by Hamas may be the last line of defense before we see the proliferation of an even more powerful al-Qaedist threat. And for the umpteenth time, no, this does not turn Hamas into a bunch of lovable teddy bears. The world is more complex than good guys vs. bad guys. More often than not, sensible political alliance-building has to be with imperfect inhabitants of a broad grey area.

Of course, with a Republican president, a party built upon destroying nuance while fighting terrorism, this disticntion is unlikely to be made. For the Norman Podhoretz types, Hamas and AQ are just both “islamofascists” despite the numerous conflicts between the two groups. This of course is in intentional ignorance of, say, Iran supporting the fight against AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Conservatives don’t seem to notice the cognitive dissonance when they say that Iran is being nefarious in supporting the Mahdi Army and the Shia in thier attacks on Sunni while at the same time bleating that Ahmandinejad and bin-Laden are both “islamofascists.” If they’re killing eachother, then they’re probably not sharing the same ideology, and America needs to deal with different groups in different ways. Then we have Mitt Romney:

This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate.

Ok, Hamas wants an Islamic Palestinian government where Israel and the Territories are, Hezbollah is a front for Iran that wants Shia representation and government in Lebanon, AQ is a Sunni group wants a world-wise caliphate, and the Muslim Brotherhood is mostly a Sunni Islamist movement most active in Egypt. This may not be relevant to Romney’s remarks, they’ve also RENOUNCED VIOLENCE, so they’re not exactly terrorists. But in GWOT, such distinction are irrelevant, even when these groups criticize and occasionally kill each other’s members.

Now, despite the recent hand-wringing over his verbal tics, Julian is still quite the cunning linguist.

Chris Hayes article on the marginalization of “heterodox” economics by the “neoclassical orthodoxy” has made the rounds. If you want an indepth discussion, check out TPM Cafe’s great roundtable on it.

I think the discussion is a bit confused. What is the problem? Is it that economists’ methodology leads them to be in virtual lock step on such issues as trade and then scorn and reject dissenters like Alan Binder?

The issue here seems to be about what the proper scope for economics is, not whether mainstream economics is the best descriptive framework for economic acitivity.

Neoclassical economics, or just mainstream economists, is a set of tools. It’s a way to analyze the productive and consumptive activity and interactions of people. It uses certain terminology, ideas and theorems to do this. There is, of course, a ton of disagreement over nearly everything. With Keynesians and Neoclassicists, there’s debates about price stickiness and menu costs, for example. There isn’t a ton of debate about how to look at such problems, however. Economics, at its base, is a descriptive, empirical exercise, not a proscriptive one. Dani Rodrik nails it:

To me it represents nothing other than a methodological predilection for deriving aggregate social phenomena from individual behavior–and as such it is a very useful discipline for any social science. You say people have some preferences, they face certain constraints, take others’ actions into account, and go from there. Neoclassical economics teaches you how to think, not what to think.

He and Paul Krugman both take no issue with the methodology, they just reach different conclusions than many of their colleagues.

David Ruccio, heterodox extraodrnaire, wants to tear down the whole artifice, and take a dump on Adam Smith’s grave while he’s at it:

We do heterodox economics, or what some refer to as political economy—as against economics (which, as Chris correctly argues, has become identified with a tiny number of theoretical approaches). We write about rates of exploitation and the role of power in increasing inequality and the existence of patriarchy and structural racism. Not only do we want to argue that economic actors are sometimes irrational or guided by norms and values; some of us also want to analyze economic institutions and events without even starting from individual actors. Or efficiency. Or constrained optimization.

Ruccio doesn’t have a great explanatory artifice, at least one that compares to the mainstream. In a Kuhnian sense, the contradictions and anomalies haven’t piled up so that a new approach is necessary. Ruccio acknowledges that what he is doing is different, he doesn’t want to talk about what most economists talk about, he wants to talk about exploitation, structural racism, inequality etc. It should be no surprise that he is marginalized from the mainstream

But where do the more moderate left-liberals, the Galbraiths, Blinders and Rodriks fit in. They don’t want to burn down the building, they just have some concerns about the effects of, say, offshoring on the economic security of American workers. They suffer from a conceptual disconnect between economics and politics. Every economist knows that trade which exploits comparative advantages in production encourages growth in GDP and maximizes efficiency. Immigration too, besides George Borjas, most economists agree that relatively open immigration will encourage growth and raise the incomes massively of many people.

Where the mainstream methodology begins to affect policy conclusions is in the relevant moral community. Low skilled immigration from Mexico, for instance, raises the wages many times of the immigrants themselves, while lowering or at least stagnating the wages of low skilled American workers. Offshoring too, helps out Indian workers much more than it hurts Americans. And the approach of mainstream economics, looking at aggregate phenomena, will (nearly) always say that increased trade and immigration are good. But economists aren’t philosophers, they can’t necessarily determine, by way of their economic training, the best or must just way to distribute or encourage the distribution of goods. Their training as economists just tells them the most efficient way to increase the economic welfare of the aggregate whole of everyone.

This odd sort of aggregate comsopolitanism also drives much of the division when discussing inequality. The mainstream economist will be worried about aggregate growth and median income, but those who are more concerned with politics will have a broader discussion of the harms of inequality, discussing non economic goods for example. The mainstream economists aren’t necessarily wrong, it’s more of a “blind men and the elephant” situation.

PS – Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan have good posts about trade and the relevant moral community, it’s good to see economists discuss these issues more forthrightly.

Sam Brownback, the Senator from Kansas, is routinely mocked on liberal blogs. His hand raising for “not believing in evolution” in the most recent debate, his earnest Christian passion for some issues and his general aura of slightly-off kilter are all easy to make fun of.  His NYtimes op-ed is reasonable enough, he’s not a creationist or even obviously an intelligent designer.  He believes, as many do, that Darwin can explain the differences between species and possibly the origins of humanity, but that it can’t explain the secret of the cosmos, man’s place on earth, human dignity etc.  It’s more an attack on a strawman of amoral Darwinian materialism than the idea that humans emerged from speciation generated by mutation resulting from differing allelic frequencies.  In short, it’s what many people believe about Darwin, Brownback was just more honest about it.

But why do I like him so much.  I mean, we disagree on so much.  My own social views almost make the Party of Death a coherent concept.  But Sam and I do agree on a few things, we just come at them from radically different viewpoints.  I feel that Brownback, and other politicians and people like Huckabee and David Kuo represent a new branch of religious conservatives, whose politics are based less around hate and disdain, and more around a very Christian idea of love.

What issues has Brownback championed in his time in the senate? Child trafficking, money for AIDS in Africa, Darfur, reforming or curtailing the death penalty and prison reform.  These, especially prison reform, are essentially thankless, with no large or natural constituency.  Yet Brownback puruses them:

”I had a health issue a few years back, and it really made my faith real,” he said, referring to a bout with cancer. ”It made me think, the things that the Lord would want done, let’s do. His heart is with the downtrodden, so let’s help them.”

Now, liberals have their own motivation to help the down trodden and vulnerable, but politics isn’t about motivation. People like Amanda Marcotte, who create a culture of disdain for such a large portion of Americans’ worldview politically, disable liberals from making contingent alliances on certain issues. Rawls’ notion of an “overlapping consensus” is useful here.  Even though he uses it describe comprehensive doctrines agreeing on some political organization, the idea can be used to describe what should be the emerging alliance among bleeding heart liberals and bleeding heart Christian conservatives; their worldviews may be very different, but their policies can be the same. That’s what politics is supposed to be about, right?  Even his rhetoric about abortion, besides his ignoring women’s centrality to the issue, is appealing. He speaks of fetuses in terms of innocent life that requires protection, an attitude that many liberals take for people outside the womb.

Brownback, on a personal level, is also immensely appealing.  It really takes love for God’s creation and a desire to help the downtrodden and vulnerable to say, adopt two kids, one from China and one from Guatemala. This man also has two heroes, John Brown and William Wilberforce.  Say what you will about the tenets of trying to overthrow the South like Spartacus, but at least its a forthright opposition towards the destruction of human dignity slavery wrought.  William Wilberforce too, had Brownbackian rhetoric and ideas about banning slavery in England, rhetoric that liberals can and should embrace.

So, what will it be, make snide jokes about his membership of Opus Dei, or make strategic, contingent alliances with people whose passion and rhetoric towards helping the weakest among us would make most liberals blush?

Via Ross, we have this appreciation of comedic genius Judd Apatow‘s work:

Both of the films Apatow has directed offer up the kind of conservative morals the Family Research Council might embrace — if the humor weren’t so filthy. In “Virgin,” the title character is saving himself for true love. “Knocked Up,” which opens on June 1, revolves around a good-hearted doofus who copes with an unplanned pregnancy by getting a job and eliminating the bong hits. In each of the films, the hero is nearly led astray by buddies who tempt with things like boxes of porn, transvestite hookers and an ideology about the ladies possibly learned from scanning Maxim while scarfing down Pop-Tarts. By the end, Apatow exposes the friends as well meaning but comically pathetic and steers his men toward doing the right thing.

I’m in the midst of writing my Knocked Up review for the next NR, so I want to keep most of my powder dry on this topic, but suffice it to say that any social conservative who wants to know how to connect with “the kids” in an era when TNR staffers volunteer as extras in “erotic films” and evangelical teens are losing their virginity earlier than mainline Protestants and Catholics ought to be locked in a room and forced to watch Apatow’s movies for an afternoon. (And I’d be happy to be locked in there with him.)

I’m a social liberal. I like gay marriage, abortion on demand (sometimes even the government pays for it!), free speech protection for porn, not raising the age of consent to be porn from 18-21, liberal obscenity laws and all that good stuff. I don’t see this as a promotion of a the antics of David, Jay and Cal, but I don’t put the pussy that is social decency and tradition on a pedestal, like some Greek goddess, and advocate explicit government action around it. And Ross’s social conservatism, at least as discussed here, isn’t really relevant to the politics at all. Someone can hold all my above beliefs as a matter of public policy and still be an Apatowian conservative. The GOP and conservatives don’t have a monopoly on not being jackasses, and it’s unclear whether any policy Douthat or the GOP promotes will help us create a nicer society where people get married to those they love, stay together, raise children together etc. In fact, the horrors of modernity, with sexual exhibitionism on MySpace and Facebook, Joe Francis etc, we have some pretty smart, virtuous kids.

Teenage pregnancy rates have declined by about a third over the past 15 years. Teenage birth and abortion rates have dropped just as much.

Young people are waiting longer to have sex. The percentage of 15-year-olds who have had sex has dropped significantly. Among 13-year-olds, the percentage has dropped even more.

They are also having fewer partners. The number of high schoolers who even report having four or more sexual partners during their lives has declined by about a quarter. Half of all high school boys now say they are virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990.

And Judd Apatow makes movies. It’s all looking pretty good.

PS – Reihan also appreciates the “conservatism” of Judd Apatow. You see, despite Ross and Reihan not explicitly linking to yesterday’s post on why we should stop talking about Chevy Chase movies and instead talk about Judd Apatow, I greatly appreciate the shift in the culturo-political conversation.

From Micheal Brendan’s response to a few of my previous posts:

 They [conservatives] must do this at the same time that managerial liberalism begins to suffer from and die from it’s exhaustion and internal contradictions – as it inevitably will. Managerial liberalism will not last forever – no ideology has. When will this all come together? We don’t know.

Who’s the crypto historicist now!

In all seriousness, me and Michael agree on more than than our interchange may show.  Two more points of substance

One – if conservatives try to infiltrate the institutions of liberalism, one of two things will happen.  One, they basically transform in managerial liberals themselves, and do very little conserving, like Mike Bloomberg or the new Newt.  OR they win an election, and just fuck up governance so bad because of their natural contempt for the entire enterprise, and get booted out for their incompetence.  It’s either a Pyrrhic victory or a resounding defeat.

Another thing, about why conservatism is almost necessarily marginalized.  Since it’s a defensive position and since at least Western societies have gotten progressively more liberal since 1789, the ground on which conservatives have to fight gets smaller and smaller.  For example, I think we’re gonna see gay marriage roll on through with the wheels of history, and Ohio’s 2004 election will appear to be a bizarre artifact of a bygone era. I imagine at a certain point, one would just get tired of losing, tired of history and the formation of modern society being fundamentally contrary to your ideals.  It’s like playing defense against the 49ers 94 era offense, on a field infinitely long with no turnovers on downs.  Sure, you might get some stops, tackle Ricky Waters behind the line a few times, sack Steve Young, hell even give a concussion.  But that offense is actually the best offense the NFL has ever seen, it can’t not stop marching down the field.

Now, there’s been debate all over the place about the relative merits of Fletch. I was born five years after Fletch came out, I’ve never seen it, and if I did, I’d probably think it was dated and boring. But this is just more than a few people talking about a common experience from their movie watching youth, no no no, it’s a perfidious exclusion of the young up and coming bloggers, dare I call them whippersnappers, from the upper echelons of the blogosphere. Why not say, talk about the political relevance of Old School, Zoolander or Fight Club, movies that are not only great, but also came out in a year when the Miami Vice soundtrack wasn’t the top album. Or we can just go on excluding younger bloggers, that’s fine, I understand how jealous and afraid you all are…

PS – and if we’re going to talk about the culturo-political import of movies that came out when I was either a newborn or toddler, let’s chat about Whit Stillman, the best conservative literary figure since Evelyn Waugh.

For someone who loves to slag off “neoclassical orthodoxy,” Ezra really is the embodiment of one of the orthodoxy’s favorite ideas: Comparitive Advantage. In reference to the High Priest of the Neoclassical Orthodoxy, N. Gregory Mankiw, lets go over a classic example of comparitive advantage, from the Bible of the Neoclassical Orthodoxy, Principles of Economics.

Michael Jordan can probably mow his lawn faster than anyone else, but just because he can mow his lawn fast, does this mean he should?

I guess the corollary is, I could try to write about Obama’s health care plan, but I’m much better at long, ranty posts about paleoconservatism. Ezra, on the other hand, is the Michael Jordan of health care blogging, and when a health care plan comes along, his subsequent blogging is kinda like this:

Whether this has any relevence to trade policy, well, that’s a debate for a different time.

Michael Brendan Dougherty, the nicest and best dressed paleocon out there, comes to the realization that conservatism probably can’t sustain people getting rich.

I’d like someone out there to list for me the conservative cultural accomplishments that can be credited to electing Thatcher and Reagan. I can’t think of any. In fact, we may soon find more conservatives arguing that the type of market reforms initiated by these regimes did much to erode traditional norms and expectations. I doubt many on the right will defend the managerial economies of the 60s and 70s. But did the reforms of the 80s do anything to enhance the economic independence of the average family? Or did these reforms just enhance Wall Street profits while at the same time discouraged what we now call “family formation”? Is integrating more families into the investor class a solution?

Now, conservatism is two things. The “conservation” of a certain traditional social structure, and the opposition to liberalism. It’s this dual nature, combined with the GOP’s cohabitation with business interests, that lead to these not every conservative structural changes in the 80s. As Marx pointed out, economic dynamism is hardly a conservative or reactionary force, it’s instead a liberalizing, liberating progressive one (in general). Why then did conservatives support an agenda based on dynamism?

It’s because, somewhat contradictorily, as people get richer, in general, government gets bigger. The expansion of government under Johnsnon in the 60s was closely connected with the liberalization and expansion of deliberative and substantive freedom for blacks, as well as the advances under civil rights law for women. Conservatives, of course, were not all too happy about Great Society liberalism, and sought to overturn the “managerial” state, or at least hold it back, under Reagan. Expanded government spending and power in the service of liberal social ideas is any good conservative’s worse nightmare, so it had to be attacked by any “conservative” administration. But after Reagan, the democrats (at least for the 90s) absorbed the conservative critique of massive, managerial government but kept on keeping on with liberalizing social norms, making no efforts to stop it. And so, we have the Bush administration, too far removed from the horrors 70s style paleoliberalism to have the same energy as the Reaganites and too enthralled with preventative war to follow up on the reformist undercurrents of his first campaign.

Conservatives are coming around that all the Reagan and Bush presidencies have given them is lower taxes and greater familial insecurity and instability. Though the Sam’s Club Republicans are promising, as long as big business and reflexively anti government Norquist types remain a large, influential constituency in the GOP, its back to the dark ages for “conservatives.”

China, always trying to one up Japan, will not just let oppressive cultural norms kill their corrupt, incompetent government officials.  They’ll just do the killing themselves.  From the NYTimes.

The former director of China’s top food and drug safety agency was sentenced to death on Tuesday after pleading guilty to corruption and accepting bribes, the state-controlled news media said.

Again, one can only imagine what it would be like if the US did anything like this.  We’d probably have to bring back the guillitione.

Mensch D-Larison has a sweet post up why the combined currents of globalization and hegemonic foreign policy are hardly “conservative” in the most simple sense, preserving a nation’s or people’s common cultural heritage. Being both a globalist and occasional supporter of hegemonic, or some sort of globally active foreign policy, I think he has it right on:

there is nothing that strange or marvelous about a combination of social and cultural conservatism and ferocious anti-globalism and anti-imperialism. Indeed, the two pretty much go hand in hand. … The more fiercely conservative you are about your religion, your culture, its habits, morals and traditions, the more likely you are to regard all forms of globalism and globalisation–political, economic, cultural–as perverse, destructive and hostile to your “vision of order” and your way of life. Opposition tohegemonism and globalisation on the one hand and opposition to cultural decay and fragmentation on the other are a natural pair. Support for their opposites (with some qualifications in the realm of foreign policy) forms another natural pair. Thepaleocon combination is the normal, relatively more common conservative response to these phenomena around the world. It doesn’t actually make sense for people who want to preserve tradition to support international capitalism with the enthusiasm that many conservatives do, and indeed some “conservatives” today not only see the contradiction but decide that they are quite happy to let tradition fall by the wayside for the most part.

Though I respect paleocons, and some sure seem to like me, and consider them both more intellectually interesting and coherent than the modern GOP or neocons, I am their opposite.

But not really, I agree that globalization, free trade, and a generally involved and interconnected foreign policy will batter down the artifice of tradition, in the US and all over the world. I, however, do not base my politics around preserving these traditions.

As I’ve talked about before, I think that capitalism and expanded trade will knock down these traditional structures, and allow people to fulfil their own ends to a much greater degree. I also talk a soft Fukuyaman attitude towards democracy and it’s spread; I feel that as capitalism breaks down the barriers between societies, and as the lure of consumer capitalism lets people know that they can exercise agency and control over their destiny, some sort of democratic arrangements, over the long term, will be inevitable. This view does not endorse the neocons “Leninist” ideas of forcing or catalyzing this process through preemeptive, unilateral warfare, it instead recognizes that traditional arrangements have been rendered irrelevant and necessarily put into decline.

The conservative movement (excluding the neocons and fundies) almost seems necessarily quietest, and with the “wheels of history” rolling all over you, this is a proper response. It is telling that the premiere vehicle for properly conservative thought, The American Conservative, advocates a kind of cultural quietism, a recognition that quotidian political involvement necessarily runs counter to the traditional virtues Anglo-American conservatism tries to preserve and cultivate. If the two planks of your politics are man’s imperfectibility and that individuals can’t really improve society more so than “3000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax,” canvassing for Marilyn Musgrave or debating over whether hedge funds’ carry should be taxed as capital gains or personal income just isn’t going to come naturally. Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosophical leader of the paleocons, advocates a type of retreat into cloisters of virtue, while Rod Dreher sees the essence of conservatism as eating locally grown, organic food.

Paleocons are, as Rod so often hints, the hippies of the right. We politically engaged lefties mock and deride those who see lefitst political invovlement to be along the lines of, well, eating locally grown organic food. This long term anti-ideological cultural politics, may actually be rescued and sustained by global capitalism’s unrelenting drive to destroy all traditional arrangements, and at the same time allow people, enriched by this drive, to follow their own path of selffufillment.

Maybe we are witnessing the end of “conservativism,” maybe entire communities will simply use their global capitalism wrought affluence to live their own conservative life, wear hats, read Brideshead Revisited, and write for the American Conservate. Conservatism always had an uneasy time with politics, maybe they should just give up..as long as they keep on linking to me. Perhaps the resurgence of paleocon views, in response to Iraq is the dead cat bouncing, so to speak. Paleocons have “resurged” so many times, outraged at “liberal” overreach; after the French Revolution, the invasion of the Philippines, WWI, the founding of the UN, GATT, the Civil Rights Movement, the ERA, Gulf War I, NAFTA, Bosnia, Kosovo and now, with Gulf War II. Too bad their very orientation is one that necessitates marginalization and irrelevance.

The Huff Post is running a wire story saying that Bill Frist, Mr Doctor By Video, has withdrawn his name from consideration to be President of the World Bank.  I mean, I guess it could be worse, for all we know, he was considering Frist instead of John Bolton.  But seriously, the fact that the guy who coudln’t see a permanent vegatative state when it blindly waved at him on video, has conflict of interest clouds already hanging over him from when he was in the Senate, may have defrauded Medicare and while in medical school, took cats from animals shelters and dissected them shows that the Bush administration has nothing but disdain for any sortof international institution.  One would hope the 2006 elections would teach them some humility, and maybe they have.  I’m rooting for either Volcker, Stanley Fischer, or Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to get the job.

Once again, the shameless milking of the government for pointless and wasteful energy subsidies in the name of “energy independence” makes me doubt the virtues of representative democracy, for distinctly un-Caplanian reasons.

Why is “energy independence” this supposed goal of foreign policy. Is it to defang Iran, thinking that the US government handing out goodies for coal is going to change their behavior. Perhaps it’s too make Russia less aggressive on the world stage, despite the fact that it’s most direct geopolitical influence comes from its large stock of nuclear weapons and natural gas that it exports to Europe. Or, do we pursue “energy independence” to provide:

loan guarantees for six to 10 major coal-to-liquid plants, each likely to cost at least $3 billion; a tax credit of 51 cents for every gallon of coal-based fuel sold through 2020; automatic subsidies if oil prices drop below $40 a barrel; and permission for the Air Force to sign 25-year contracts for almost a billion gallons a year of coal-based jet fuel.

One may ask, in a world where people are conscious of the harm carbon emissions can do, why are the two parties uniting around coal, which for all you chemistry buffs, is a solid hunk o’ carbon, just waiting to get burned and released into the atmosphere. Well, just because various states and regions have been bilking the federal government for years to no good effect, doesn’t mean law makers have grown any more weary of such proposals, instead they’ve just gotten better at selling this snake-oil, err, liquefied coal.

But the scale of proposed subsidies for coal could exceed those for any alternative fuel, including corn-based ethanol. …

Coal industry executives insist their fuel can actually be cleaner than oil, because they would capture the gas produced as the liquid fuel is being made and store it underground. Some could be injected into oil fields to push oil to the surface. Several aspiring coal-to-liquid companies say that they would reduce greenhouse emissions even further by using renewable fuels for part of the process

This sounds like total bullshit, right, how on earth can burning coal ever reduce emissions, or even just pump as much carbon ito the atmosphere as petroleum. Well, you’re right, it is total bullshit.

Coal-to-liquid fuels produce almost twice the volume of greenhouse gases as ordinary diesel. In addition to the carbon dioxide emitted while using the fuel, the production process creates almost a ton of carbon dioxide for every barrel of liquid fuel..

The M.I.T. team expressed even more skepticism about the economic risks. It estimated that it would cost $70 billion to build enough plants to replace 10 percent of American gasoline consumption.

The study estimates that the construction costs for coal-to-liquid plants are almost four times higher than the costs for comparable petroleum refineries, and it argues that cost estimates for synthetic fuel plants in the past turned out to be “wildly optimistic.”

In a new report last week, the Energy Department estimated that a plant capable of making 50,000 barrels of liquefied coal a day — a tiny fraction of the nearly 9 million barrels in gasoline burned daily in the United States — would cost $4.5 billion.

In other words, it would be more environmentally sound and we’d save if money if we just subsidized the building of more oil power plants and gasoline refineries. There’s one condition where I’d be OK with this bill passing, if it came along with a carbon tax. Why not screw over these assholes from extorting money from the government for no discernible public good besides handouts to their regions (its no surprise that the main proponents of this bill come from states that end in “Virginia”. Even Obama is in on board with this travesty, which is just shameful. This debacle is yet another case of why enacting serious measures against climate change in the US is going to be awfully difficult. I guess that’s another reason to support Richardson, who managed to give his keynote energy policy speech without saying “ethanol” or “coal.”

Now, I don’t think any candidates have proposed the Whippersnapper energy plan. A carbon tax, subsidies for China to build nuclear power plants, fast tracking nuclear power plants here, stop subsidizing and protecting corn ethanol, allowing tariff free importation of sugar ethanol from Brazil, increased mileage standards and…. algae based biodiesel!

One final note about coal-to-liquid fuels. They’ve only been used on a wide-scale in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa. Coincidence…I think not.

Known as the Fischer-Tropsch process, the technology dates to the 1920s. It was used by Germany during World War II and by South Africa during the apartheid era,

UPDATE: I didn’t know about this until after I wrote this post, but Brad Plumer has a sweet article on TNR.com on the liquefied coal boondoggle. Despite it’s considerable merits, he doesn’t call liquefied coal advocates Nazis, which is why I get all the readers, right?

Marty Peretz, brave blog warrior, puts his amazing prose style on display today at the The Spine.

E.J. Dionne, Jr. is one of the wisest and wryest journalists of his generation. E.J., as he has been known at least since college, was a student of mine, and is a good, though, not often enough seen, friend. So I read him, which actually gets you even some of his charm.

I really dig the pioneering use of the passive voice, a construction whose use has been counseled against since grade school, and the appositive, a sometimes illuminating phrase that often makes one’s writing less clear, in this literary tour de force. But who knows, maybe because “neither smarts nor knowledge carry much cachet in the left blogosphere” I just “ridicule the writers whose arguments [I} can’t quite grasp.”

Some parts of Japan’s honor culture that encourage and valorize suicide seem very disturbing and earlier today, the Japanese Agricultural Minister killed himself over allegations of impropriety:

Japan’s agriculture minister, Toshikatsu Matsuoka, killed himself on Monday, just hours before he was to face parliamentary questioning about a political finance scandal, government officials said.

Imagine if in the USA, every government official who was accused of some sort of impropriety and had to testify before congress hari kari-ed him or herself?  I’m not saying I’d welcome this, but it would sure be a boon to the DC area funeral home business…

Of course, H/T to Spackerman.

K-Lo bemoans the lack of Iraq war cheerleading, jingoistic, ass-kicking editorials in our major newspapers on Memorial Day:

It [Memorial Day] seems to be missing from the major editorial pages too, a friend points out:

N.Y. Times has AMT, farm bill, DNA

L.A. Times has a lengthy editorial on the carbon tax

WaPo does reference Memorial Day, in reference to immigration.

Of course, she ignores this and this. But when you think a proper memorial day editorial consists of providng bankrupt “support” for the troops by supporting the continuation and escalation of a war with no clear mission and no clear vision of what winning would even would look like as well as creating thousands of soldiers who needlessly died and will die and thus can be memorialized today, one should worry about K-Lo’s judgement about what a good Memorial Day editorial looks like.

I love The American Scene, and just because Ross left doesn’t mean I’ve stoppedreading. Well, that’s not entirely true, I have stopped reading, because there hasn’t really been anything to read Since May 11th. Us masses, thristy for Reihan’s wit and wisdom, have had three meesly posts, two of them promising a new American Scene. After the first post on the 16th, we got this one on the 25th:

So, The New American Scene is coming. Yep. Really soon. I think we need to shift over the archives and finalize the format.

At what point are we allowed to start comparing “The New American Scene” with Chinese Democracy?

In an otherwise interesting, important and surely contentious article that I’ll post about in depth later, Chris Hayes writes a bizarre paragraph that makes one wonder about the quality of The Nation’s editors.

So extreme is the marginalization of heterodox economists, most people don’t even know they exist. Despite the fact that as many as one in five professional economists belongs to a professional association that might be described as heterodox, the phrase “heterodox economics” has appeared exactly once in the New York Times since 1981. During that same period “intelligent design,” a theory endorsed by not a single published, peer-reviewed piece of scholarship, has appeared 367 times.

Ok, this is stupid for a few reasons. One, ‘heterodox economics’ as Hayes explains, is not a term of art. It’s an imperfect phrase used to describe a disparate group of economists who don’t have much in common besides a rejection or questioning of the assumptions, methodology and conclusions of the “neoclassical orthodoxy.” Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is a term of art used by its proponents like William Dembski, Michael Behe and those in the Discovery Institute. It actually purports describes a whole set of postulations about the nature of life on earth, and is rather unified, notwithstanding its lack of falsifiablilty or scientific rigor.

Why now, you may ask, would the New York Times be willing to write about an oft derided, nonscientific fig leaf for creationism? I mean, they oppose right wing economic policies, and yet don’t give the ‘heterodox economists’ any love. It’s because Intelligent Design is so dumb, so contrary to evolution. It’s because Bush said they should teach the controversy, its because three GOP candidates don’t believe in evolution, it’s because many Inteligent Design’s proponents try to gussy up Williams Jennings Bryant style creationism in scientific garb, and have a knack for self promotion. Thus the NY Times covers it.

Surely Hayes knows all of this, yet still manages to throw in this misleading non sequiter into his article. Are Nation readers this dumb? Are their editors so foolish? Or, in a suprising Straussian move, is Hayes’ esoteric message that ‘heterodox economics’ is, in fact, on par with I.D.?