Matt Zeitlin

Sam Tanenhaus – the best historian of modern conservatism not named Rick Perlstein – has a good 8 minute interview giving us some more background on a fascinating man.

Rick Perlstein on Buckley.  Must-read

Ezra Klein says positive things

Dylan Matthews and Brad DeLong provide necessary counterpoints to the liberal Buckley love.
Peter Wehner remembers Buckley’s faith, which was incredibly central to this life.

And, finally, Ramesh Ponnuru captures something that struck me when Buckley’s old, weary, “decomposing” visage was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.  His eyes.   His eyes always showed a certain youthful vitality and playfulness about him.  While this could be endlessly frustrating as he opposed programs and policies or support the Vietnam War in a way that we liberals would describe as callous, it reminded us how much he loved writing, language, debate and his desire to elevate discourse into something more than just commentary.  And it’s this spirit and energy that was able to shine through despite his advanced age that I will certainly miss.

As a liberal who thinks that much of what National Review championed in its golden years – hawkish cold war policy, segregation, reaction against the cultural openness of the 1960s, wacky Franco-worship and just generally being conservative – as extremely misguided, I shouldn’t like William F. Buckley Jr. as much as I do.

But there will always be conservatives, and as far as they go, Buckley had some special, endearing qualities. As a writer and a thinker, he shows to all of us who deign to write about politics that our ideas can be incredibly influential, if expressed articulately and forcefully. He showed us that using the English language well could elevate one’s discourse from mere commentary to something approximating literature. His show, Firing Line, was the one of the better things to be on TV, and as far as encouraging smart people to say smart things, it in many ways anticipated bloggingheads.tv. He was also, if I may say so, something of a badass. He was a spy in Mexico, had a funny patrician accent, was an unabashed elitist, spent winters skiing in Gstaad and was a model for how political commentators could actually be cool.

But of course, we must pay attention to his ideas and politics. And any liberal must be opposed to Buckley’s politics, he was after all, someone who basically defined himself in opposition to American liberalism. But when he was forming a conservative coalition in the 50s and 60s, he was good to expel the Randians and the anti-semites. And, as a Jew, I can’t help but be touched that this oil-heir, patrician, conservative Yalie was willing to hire so many Jews to write for his conservative publication. The conservative movement wasn’t always friendly to Jews, and Buckley himself realized why this was both wrong and detrimental. His 1991 essay, “In Search of Anti-Semitism” is a piercing exploration of anti-semitism in American conservatism, his own family and of his former colleague Joe Sobran. For statements like this, I can’t help but be thankful.

Conservatism as a tendency, political movement and an ideology will always be with us. And if more conservatives were like Buckley in ideology, style, manner and temperament, I can’t help but think that our country would be healthier place.

While I don’t condone calling people who criticize Christianity or certain interpretations of it the “antichrist”, I still find it odd that Deepak Chopra, yes Deepak Chopra, is so offended that his trying to turn Jesus into some sort of New Age guru who spouts nonsense about universal consciousness  that sounds an awful lot like Chopra’s standard fare isn’t being received to well by actual believing Christians.   And while Chopra and I probably agree that fundamentalist Christianity is probably a bad thing, his actual claims in “Why We Need a New Jesus” are pretty lame.  For instance, his central claim is that the current interpretation of Jesus – which he never really explains (in a faith of 1 billion and 20,000 sects, there are plenty of interpretations of Jesus) is not satisfactory for people who want to see Jesus as someone who peddles books like “Be Your Own Guru.”

Many believers are satisfied with one or the other Jesus, and yet millions are not. They have witnessed their faith being hijacked by rigid fundamentalism. A teaching of love and peace has been perverted to justify war and bigotry. These deeply disturbing trends speak of a single radical need: the need for a new Jesus. In particular, there’s a hunger that has existed as long as the Church itself, which is a hunger to relate to Jesus personally. Although not raised as a Christian, I went to a Catholic-run missionary school in India and fell under the romantic spell of a universal Savior. I wanted to know, as anyone would, how to fulfill Jesus’s promise that the Kingdom of Heaven is within.

I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground here, but the complaint that “a teaching of love and peace has been perverted to justify war an bigotry” has been around for as long as there have been Christianity.  And what makes his argument even weaker, besides how boringly generic it is, is that it’s the fundamentalist strains of Christianity that are gaining the most followers.  Look at mainline protestantism descent into irrelevance in America, or Pope Benedict’s turn towards traditionalism, or Pentecostalism gaining a foothold in Latin America and Africa.  It’s these strains of faith, especially the evangelical ones, that emphasize a personal relation to Christ.  So it’s not exactly clear what Chopra is protesting, besides the fact that Christians haven’t come around to the true meaning of Christ, namely, that Chopra is He.

As someone who has lingering sympathy for the first generation of domestic policy neoconservatives like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the gang at the Public Interest, I’m not too thrilled that neo-con is basically used as an all-purpose epithet.  Mostly because when people just throw out the term neo-con, it can obscure true ideological and political differences between those who supported the Iraq War.  For instance, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are old school imperialist hawks, not neoconservatives.

But the term is useful, and should be used as an epithet, for describing a particular vision of foreign policy that has undoubtedly been disastrous.  Considering that for every foreign policy neoconservative, the invasion of Iraq was the central objective, it makes sense that term has turned into a derisive epithet.  Considering neoconservatives during the run-up to Iraq defined themselves as the most pure supporters of the Iraq war, and called their opponents to the right heartless, amoral realists (and sometimes racists) and their opponents to the left pacifistic appeasers to evil, some opprobrium is in order.  But that opprobrium should be limited to foreign affairs.  The neoconservative revolution in domestic policy has already happened.  Welfare reform passed over a decade ago, despite a liberal resurgence, wide-eyed social engineering projects like school-busing is still frowned upon.

The empirical style of conservatism, in which conservative policies were justified using modern social science, is still very much in vogue. Just look at David Frum’s Comeback or the variety attempts by conservatives like Stanley Kurtz and Maggie Gallagher to make the secular case against gay marriage by claiming (wrongly, in my view) that gay marriage hurts marriage as an institution and that institution provides a variety of societal goods. I’d argue that despite ideological differences, the style and objectives of Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Ramesh Ponnuru, Daniel Casse, Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin are very reminiscent of the original neoconservatives.  This is a provincial interpretation.  But I think that neoconservatism could be defined outside of its cultural box of “jews in the early 1970s reacting against flawed liberal social policy” and instead could be described as a tendency to explain and generate conservative policies using, in a very basic sense, liberal values and intuitions.

What I mean is that neoconservatives are more likely to use the liberal moral senses, in the schema of Jonathan Haidt, of “harm” and “reciprocity” to justify conservative polices rather than just appealing to “honor” or “ingroup” or “purity.” But you will surely say, don’t many of the so-called neoconservatives you mentioned reject Haidt’s work, doesn’t Leon Kass, a neo-conservative if there ever was one, base most of his philosophical project on the “wisdom of repugnance?”  Well, yes, he does, and Ross Douthat isn’t about to abandon in-group preference and become some sort of cosmopolitan egalitarian.  But look at how conservatives justify their preference for purity and in group preference over more abstract claims like harm or reciprocity.  What was once just prejudice has turned into an argument grounded in evolutionary science and social science showing that people’s bonds are more readily forged with those in their in-group and that these bonds are the making of a decent society.  This is just Burke rewritten for the 20th and 21st centuries.

But the problem is that these arguments from neo-conservatives aren’t exactly floating to the top in the Republican party or the conservative movement in general.  Except in foreign policy.  That’s where neo-conservative were actually able to gain a foothold in a party whose domestic policy is dominated on one hand by Norquistian tax cutters and by the other reactionary evangelicals.  And so, neo-conservatism has become associated with Iraq, as it should be.  That’s because most people aren’t like me and can read Peter Berkowitz’s articles in Policy Review of Yuval Levin in Commentary and pleasanty nod along, thinking what they right is interesting if wrong headed.  Instead, the neoconservatives got their chance to really shape policy in Iraq…and look what happened.

And it’s certainly unfortunate that such an intellectually stimulating and historically important tradition had to debase itself on such a misguided, disastrous war.  But debase themselves – and this country – they did.  And so neoconservative will be used as an epithet to describe war supporters.  And no, Russel Berman, it’s not because liberals see neo-conservative as especially mendacious traitors (most liberals probably couldn’t give you the Spark Notes history of neoconservatism, it’s because we think the Iraq War is a total fucking mess.  It’s fitting that the faction of ideas is now hanging for its one big idea.  It may not be entirely just, but it’s certainly appropriate.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I always feel slightly ill when I see Clinton and Obama competing to say who thought NAFTA was worse first.  There’s all sorts of reasons for this reaction.  For one, Clinton is either being mendacious or stupid by claiming that she a. opposed NAFTA consistently and b. takes credit for all the accomplishments of the Clinton administration..except NAFTA.  Not to mention that she had defended all of Bill’s recond, including NAFTA in the past.  With Obama, the feeling is more one of disappointment.  His “opposition” to NAFTA is weird.  As David Leonhardt points out in his excellent column on the issue, neither Clinton nor Obama supports overturning NAFTA, instead they want to tinker with the buerecratic architecture of the bill.  What’s even more annoying (but also reassuring) is that Obama is closer to the center than Clinton on trade. If you put aside NAFTA, Clinton was originally the one pounding Obama on trade.  It’s just that her breathtaking two-timing on what she thought about NAFTA when has given Obama an opening to criticize her from her left in a very anti-trade state.

Call me naive, but this anti-trader ain’t the real Obama.  In the Audacity of Hope, he makes the social democratic argument for trade very convincingly (more trade, more social insurance).  In the Senate, he’s supported the Peru Trade Deal, which has pissed off true-blue anti-traders (Matt Stoller et al). What we’re seeing here is just some true-blue pandering.  He knows that people in Ohio have seen their median incomes fall (but not in the 90s, immediately after NAFTA was passed), he knows that manufacutring jobs are leaving (not to Mexico, but to technological advancement and China) and he knows that many Democrats see NAFTA as the height of Clintonian caving to Robert Rubin and his gang of free market Dems.  So yes, it’s disappointing that he’s giving credence to such uninformed, reactionary rhetoric, but seeing as he has literally zero policy substance that matches up with the tone of his words, I’m not too worried.  And it’s not like Bush or McCain is really going to get us to complete the Doha round anyway.

Mexican immigrants – legal and illegal – are less educated and have lower incomes than the rest of the population, so it makes sense that they would have a higher crime rate than average.  It turns out, in California at least, that they don’t.  And the difference between Mexican immigrants and the average isn’t just trivial, it’s rather significant.  It’s easy to explain why this is true for illegal immigrants — they have a huge incentive to avoid any contact with law enforcement and so the benefit gained from the commission of crime is easily outweighed by the possibility of deportation.

And, of course, software engineers in the US on H-1B visas don’t commit crimes at any high rates, and Mexicans don’t either.  From a study by the Public Policy Institute of California:

Noncitizen men from Mexico between the ages of 18 and 40, which the study indicated were more likely to be in the country illegally, were eight times less likely to be in a “correctional setting,” the study found.

So often, crime is associated with illegal immigrants, and especially Latino and Chicano men who live in urban areas.  And since so much of our fear of immigrants (despite little evidence that they drive down wages or increase crime) is driven by a classic fear of the unknown, the different and the foreign, it’s not surprising that people just assumed that immigrants would increase crime.

This is why I think that people who favor greater immigration, like immigrants, and think that restrictionism is stupid shouldn’t necessarily get bogged down in exactly what the effect on wages is or how much crime goes up or down.  Instead, we should recognize that a la Jonathan Haidt that our emotional connection to immigrants is borne out of our valuing of fairness and harm in our moral calculations as opposed to honor or purity.  And sure, evidence that immigration has little negative effects on the US economy are fine, but that’s not why we support immigration.  We support immigration and refuse to stigmatize illegal immigrants because the gains to the immigrants themselves are extremely high.  Basically because they’re people too.  And until the other side realizes this, most immigration debates are pretty silly.  You can’t fight atavistic prejudice with facts.

So it turns out that copyright-guru/wine track messiah Lawrence Lessig isn’t running for Tom Lantos’ congressional seat after all.  As I suspected, he consulted some pollsters and realized that he’d be crushed by Jackie Speier, who has been representing the South Bay Area since decades before I was born. What Lessig did may have been perfect.  Had he actually ran and gotten crushed, his message on political reform and copyright would have been associated with taking an electoral beating.  This way, he got a decent amount of media attention from outside his hard core supporters.  More people know who Lessig is and what he wants to do.  Ultimately, this is a net positive for him.  Perhaps he could be appointed to the FCC by Obama…that would certainly shake things up in a productive way.

Mike, who has some serious disagreements with me on what should be included in the literary canon and what its purpose is, admits that he doesn’t really like Toni Morrison or Virginia Woolf.  Now, having read both Woolf and Morrison in high school, I can definitely sympathize with him.  Beloved, while telling an amazing story about the horrors of slavery that most people are rarely exposed to, has an entire section that is just bewilderingly obtuse.  It also didn’t help that us reading Beloved sophomore year appeared to just be compensation for reading Huck Finn.   And Virginia Woolf, well, she is  early 20th century modernism at either its greatest or its worse.  As an example of why some people love her and (most) find her to be frustrating is that To The Lighthouse has about a 3″ x5″ notecard worth of quoted dialog.  And at one point, the house is the main narrating character.

What’s odd about Woolf’s inclusion in some high school curricula is that it’s almost certainly a token pick.  Becuase if you wanted to expose some brave high schoolers to modernism, there’s enough Joyce and Faulkner to go around.  But you really don’t want high schoolers to read Joyce and Faulkner, because amazingly obtuse, multi-perspective narrated novels with little plot and almost deliberating confusing narrative devices aren’t exactly the best stuff to mull over in a 45 minute high school English class.  But if you have a woman writing that type of book, then there’s a good reason to include it.  But the weird thing about To the Lighthouse is that it’s not particularly feminine, and while it does have a feminine and domestic perspective that many male-written novels lack, it’s that it’s particularly difficult to read and is probably unlike anything read in most high schools until then.

And that’s the great trick of including Virginia Woolf in high school curricula; you put her in for the same reason that you include tripe like House on Mango Street, and you expose high schoolers to some very legitimate literature that will challenge them in ways they haven’t really anticipated literature challenging them.  That or they will hate it and never read Woolf or any modernist literature ever again.

As you all know, I’m a big David Frum fan.  And because I like good, liberal journalism, I’m basically a John Judis fanboy.  So what did I find as a I navigated to bloggingheads’ website?  That’s right, a diavlog between Frum and Judis.  Having watched zero minutes of this episode, I can confidently say that it will be a really good one.  Bravo Robert Wright, bravo.

Oh yeah, and John Judis is such a boss, that he doesn’t introduce himself.

This is probably as good a time as ever to link to and encourage everyone to read Judis’ excellent profile of Obama, American Adam. This more historically grounded look at Obama’s rhetoric and message, which is often derided as utopian dreaming and what not, shows how the message of “hope” is not just empty sloganeering, but is really a central progressive theme that should not be so readily mocked.

Peter Suderman makes a lot of good points in this post, in which he claims that in a wealthy, secular world in which external sources of meaning (religion, loyalty to the state etc) are dwindling, that people have turned to the environment as a source for meaning.  The implication for politics, so Suderman claims, is that, “environmentalism…becomes a form of antipolitics, one intended to supersede both the collective and individual choices that are part of modern politics.” He is mentioning global warming, and especially fear-driven, crisis based discussions of it, in which the threat is portrayed as so imminent and the magnitude so great, that political norms and processes(not to mention individual rights) must be ignored.   Suderman is very convincing, but also, I think, mistaken, so let’s deal with his claims in some detail.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I read “Portly Dyke” defense of not voting for a Democratic candidate because they are insufficiently progressive on LBGT issues and some other ones, I didn’t want to respond because I, as a white male, don’t really have any issues that really directly affect my autonomy or rights to freely associate with the people I care about.  But Portly’s complaints, namely that there have been racist and sexist dogwhistles from both campaigns and because they haven’t sufficiently apologized for it, sounds pretty narcissistic and lame.  The way the two party system works is that because each party usually gets 50% of the electorate, there’s a whole lot of people they can’t perfectly satisfy.  My own candidate, for instance, has plenty of policies that I think are dumb and lots of rhetoric I disagree with.  Whenever he opens his mouth about NAFTA, I cringe.  I think his patriot business plan and removing the cap on payroll taxes are pretty bad ideas. It just so happens that I agree with about 75% of his policies and that I think things like withdrawing from Iraq, getting more government money into health care, judges, abortion, getting rid of the Bush tax cuts etc etc etc are more important than whatever differences I have.  And while I can’t ever understand the actual impact of candidates being so lame on LGBT issues the same way an actual queer person could, it really does seem like in this election especially, holding one’s nose is pretty crucial.

On another note, Ralph Nader announced that he’s running for president.  I’ll let you figure out the relevance.

February 24th is an important day.  In 1803, Marbury v Madison was decided on February 24th, establishing judicial review.  The first New Orleans Mardi Gras parade was held in 1868 on Feb 24.  NPR was founded in 1970 and Ayatollah Khomeini offered a bounty for Salman Rushdie in 1989.  But even more important than all that, I was born on February 24th, 1990.  And today, February 24th, 2008, I’m officially an adult. So I’m free to do all sorts of awesome things like buy cigarettes, lottery tickets and porn, register for the draft, not be able to legally drink for three years and sign my own absence slips.

But as far as the blog is concerned, nothing is changing.  While my fellow Februarian, Dylan Matthews, changed his nomme de blog on his 18th birthday, I’m sticking with “impetuous young whippersnapper.”  Because even at 18, my young age and appearance of preciousness is really all I have going for me in the blogosphere.   I think I can ride out this entire whippersnapper thing until I’m at least 21, at which point I’ll reevaluate.

So I’m confused here.  On one hand, we’re supposed to give Clinton credit for having eight years of relevant experience in the White House despite the fact that she had no security clearance and the one major policy initiative she was assigned to get through congress, she failed miserably at.  Also, we’re supposed to magically associate Clinton with all the good policies her husband put through.  But on the other hand, she can tell voters that she opposed NAFTA when it was passed, thus giving her some labor-working class cred.  But if she was doing so much in the White House, being so influential and gaining so much experience, then why was NAFTA passed?  Some experience you got there…

No no, the title isn’t a joke.  But I just want to register that contra W magazine, my “celebrity crush list” includes both Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman (real name Hershlag).  Me and every other guy in the world.

And while many people may have crushes on those two, I think I’m in a unique spot.  You see, Scarlett Johansson called my family to tell us to vote for Barack Obama* and, when I was visiting my brother while he was in college, I saw Natalie Portman at a restaurant.

And yes, this entire post was just an excuse to post this picture

Small gene pool my ass! (well, Scarlett is half, but the point still stands) I should note, however, that many of my friends who share this opinion are also Jewish, likes Ms. Johansen and Ms. Portman, so maybe it’s an unrepresentative sample.  And since every American Jew is also a part time fantasy matchmaker/husbander, can you imagine if Natalie Portman and Noah Feldman were to get together? The resulting offspring would be as close to the Messiah as we’re ever going to get.

Can we please get Phoebe Maltz to comment on this?

*A recording of Johansson, but still.

I totally believe Michael Crowley when he says that Republicans are going to go after Obama by implying that he isn’t really patriotic.  At first glance, this isn’t all that meaningul, the GOP has accused Democrats of being America haters since the late 1960s, so a full frontal assault on Obama’s patriotism should be expected.  And unfortunately, there’s a bunch of meaningless, little incidents that could be strung together in an email or a TV ad to prove that Obama isn’t patriotic.  You have him not wearing a flag pin, Michelle Obama’s comments about never being proud of her country, meeting with ex-weathermen and bunch of other crap.

All attacks on Democrats, especially presidential candidates, patriotism since the 60s has been BS, but this line of attack against Obama is both especially stupid and especially pernicious.  Obama, more so than many Republicans, talks about American accomplishments and the central goodness of America.  He channels and projects optimistism about the future because of great things accomplished in the past.  A better, more visceral, example of how Obama is almost uniquely patriotic compared to Clinton and especially to Edwards is his Iowa victory speech.  His supporters started spontaneously chanting “USA, USA, USA!”  When’s the last time you saw that happen for a Democratic candidate?

But even though attacks on Obama’s patriotism are only marginally more stupid than attacks on any Democratic candidate’s patriotism, there is something especially distasteful about this line of attack on Obama.  It’s no surprise that while most mainstream conservatives have not endorsed the “Obama’s a muslim!” smear, they’re perfectly willing to say (or at least condone) that because Obama has mixed race parents, he must be a communist, and things along those lines.  Is it any surprise that the ethnic minority candidate, the candidate who lived in a foreign country, the candidate whose made his appeal to foreigners a central plank of his campaign, the candidate with the Swahili name is the one whose patriotism Republicans are planning to assail? Disgusting.

For a 1000 word exploration for why accusing just about anyone of being unpatriotic is stupid, click here.

There’s a whole lot wrong about Mona Charen’s most recent column in which she points to the shooting down of this chemical-laden satellite as proof that strategic missile defense is a good idea.  Of course, there’s no mention how, as Yglesias put it, a functioning missile defense system would force Russia and CHina to build up their nuclear arsenals (putting us back at square one), touching off another wave of nuclear proliferation and absolutely decimating the NPT.  She also doesn’t mentionthat it’s really unclear who we are defending ourselves against (Neither Iran nor North Korea has ICBM capability)  But those are real substantive arguments about missile defense that people in good faith can discuss and disagree over.  What prevents good faith arguments about a really important issue is just lying about ones opponents:

General rejoicing? Not exactly. The Washington Post reports that “Scientists, arms-control advocates and others said the shoot-down was based on questionable modeling by the government of the risks to human health and was a danger to the future peaceful use of space.” Questionable modeling? Aren’t these the same people who argue that we must all abandon our passenger cars because computer modeling suggests the world may be getting a bit warmer? As for arms-control advocates, where were they back in January 2007 when China blew up a satellite that was orbiting the Earth? The Chinese were obviously testing military technology as the weather satellite they destroyed was in no danger of plunging to earth. Further, that satellite was orbiting at an altitude of 537 miles. Its destruction therefore spread debris through space, complicating the orbits of other satellites. But the arms control advocates were quiet.

That’s quite the claim Charen makes.  China’s shooting down the weather satellite was quite the landmark event, the first of its kind in over twenty years, displaying that China could greatly disrupt our satellites and was willing to spew debris all over space just to prove a point.  It  had grave implications for arms control, the safety of commercial satellites and for non-proliferation.  So, were the arms control advocates quiet?  Well, in short, no.  Here’s Jeffrey Lewis condemning the anti-satellite test, here’s Robert Wright and Jeffrey Lewis condemning China, Joseph Cirincione condemned the test as did Edward Markey and the heads of several defense and arms control related think tanks.  Basically, everyone in the arms control and the proliferation community found the test worrying.  Now, Charen was probably expecting that arms control folk solely condemn China, and not deign to mention that the Bush administration has consistently refused to try and establish an international infrastructure or treaty for limiting the use of space weapons, and really has just been ignoring the issue of arms control for as long as they’ve been in power.

Even more odd about Charen’s bogus tu quoque for American’s arm control advocates is that she expects them to be as critical of China as they are of the United States.  This makes just about zero sense.  If you’re Joseph Cirincione or Jeffrey Lewis, it’s not Chinese TV you get interviewed on or Chinese news papers you can write in.  Your think tank is located in Cambridge or DC, not Beijing.  You have the ear of American congressman and policymakers, not Chinese ones.  So it makes sense to spend the overwhelming majority of your time trying to influence policy in your own country.

UPDATE:  As I was writing this, I read Fred Kaplan’s Slate column debunking the claim that the successful shooting down of this satellite was in any way a vindication of missile defense.   You should the entire piece, but the basic point is that we know it’s possible to “shoot a bullet with a bullet.”  The real question is if we can shoot “several bullets with several bullets over a short period of time.”  The recent shoot down didn’t prove that, it instead showed, “that the missile-defense system, once it’s installed, might be able to shoot down a) one decoy-less missile b) fired from a distant, known site c) along an arc within range of our radars and interceptors.”  Not exactly much to write home about.

The Times has a cool story discussing the secret CIA base in Pakistan where they launched the Predator drone that killed an Al Qaeda bigwig about a month ago. The problem is, of course, with Musharraf now a lame duck and a large source of his unpopularity being his close ties to the United States, the CIA is worried that they might not be able to hold on to their super-sweet base in Pakistan, and even if they do, they won’t be able to launch attacks so easily.

I hate to say it, but I have to sympathize with the CIA here. Disrupting Al Qaeda’s organizational capacity with targeted killings seems to prevent more terrorist attacks than the accompanying blowblack would invited, and obviously, its better if we can have the Predators be in the same place as the terrorists.

But, at the same time, this is just another outgrowth of our serially stupid Pakistan policy. Musharraf was unpopular for a lot of reasons, and while his closeness to the US was certainly one of them, a lot of his unpopularity had nothing to do with us; instead it was his heavy handedness, his coming to power in a coup, his sacking of the Chief Justice. So while we may have been supporting Musharraf because of his willingness to cooperate in killing terrorists (and even here he wasn’t perfect), the US becomes associated with all the other, tangentially related bad stuff that Musharraf did. Now, with Musharraf as a functional lame duck, we have to work with new people who don’t want to be tainted by working so closely with the US, which is now associated in the Pakistani public with military dictatorship and disgust for democracy.

This is why, in general, erring on the side of democracy, and against meddling, is a good foreign policy idea. Because our influence over far away states we barely understand is limited, and in the words of John Judis, “natives eventually grow restless,” investing a ton of support in a leader whose position is precarious and then refusing to lead him away from actively sabotaging his position is never going to end up well in the long term. Just look at the Shah in Iran, we supported this brutal unpopular dictator well past his expiration date and when he was inevitably removed from power, we had no influence over the new leaders because they saw the Shah and America as one in the same.

The case of Pakistan is particularly distressing because our interests really are convergent. Pakistan gains nothing from Al Qaeda and the Taliban having a sanctuary within its borders and the people who are now empowered aren’t super-duper hostile to West and America (though Sharif is close to outright hostility towards America, and with good reason, we didn’t particularly care when Musharraf removed him in a coup and then lavished favors on him) so we’ll probably be able to get something resembeling a workable agreement about anti-terrorism operations within Pakistan. But by supporting Musharraf, and even worse, by so blatantly standing by him as he was dismantling the few remaining democratic institutions left in Pakistan, we’ve made securing our interests – in both the long and short terms – much more difficult.

Dylan Matthews very much approves of Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres proposal to, among other things, make campaign contributions anonymous.  This, as opposed to most other reforms, doesn’t try to run up against the inevitability of money in campaigns.  It also wouldn’t obviously be ruled unconstitutional and wouldn’t discourage a genuinely salutary development in our democracy: the prevalence and importance small donors.  (In fact, Ackerman and Ayres plan would give every citizen a 50 dolalr voucher to contribute). The 50 dollar voucher would create a 6 billion dollar pool of public money, and since the voucher would expire on election day, there would be great incentive to spend it.  This would greatly democratize the fundraising process and change the system so that for any candidate to get off the ground, they wouldn’t have to corral the support of influential rich people.

But Ackerman and Ayres aren’t so naive to think that giving every voter $50 will take money out of politics.  The plan (profiled in Salon) would increase the maximum donation to $100,000, but would also mandate that all checks be written to the FEC and that they be delivered in random increments according to a secret algorithm.  Trading money for favors becomes much more difficult because, after all, you can’t trust anyone who has said that they’ve donated to your campaign.

Of course, good ideas like this are bound to not be implemented(does any serious policy analyst support agricultural subsides?).  The thing about serious campaign finance reform is that it’s clear where the divisions lie – the ones in power support the status quo while the insurgents and challengers want change.  Why would any politician want to seriously change the system that got him or her into power?  There is one candidate, however, for whom such a proposal would seem ideal.  That candidate is, of course, Barack Obama.

Obama already is campaigning on something approximating the Ackerman-Ayres model – lots of small contributions and then some big ones from rich people who don’t appear to trying to curry favors or influence (unlike many of Clinton’s rich supporters) but really seem to believe in Obama (for those of you who doubt me, I know these wealthy Obama fundraisers, and they aren’t trying to buy influence, they love the guy).  But the Obama campaign could easily benefit from such a plan. I am someone who, because he doesn’t have a credit card and doesn’t really want to hit up my parents to give money to campaigns, would be someone who would instantly spend the 25$ alloted for presidential candidates on Obama.  Many of my friends who are at least nominal Obama supporters would do the same.  Considering that much of Obama’s support base, young people, don’t necessarily have a ton of dough to splurge, this voucher would be perfect for campaigns like his.  But of course, Obama also has a lot of rich people supporting him.  Those people would be able to give more money to his campaign than they do now and they could still probably get the social boost from giving, because they they would still be able to fundraise and announce their donations.  And while Obama wouldn’t be able to trust them, people in their peer group probably still would.

But most importantly for Obama, this plan really encapsulates a lot of his major themes.  He talks about energizing voters, bringing out new ones (which he has been able to do) and more broadly, trying to “re-involve the American populace in the process of self-governance.  Ackerman-Ayres would, if I may think hopefully here, would really empower people to be actively involved in their own government.  A big problem with how campaigns are funded, and ultimately directed, is that a shadowy, unknowable group of well connected bigwigs are funding and directing campaigns, leaving the actual voters out.  Dean’s campaign and now Obama’s are breaks in this trend, but the democratization of billion dollar presidential campaigns is still hardly the norm and probably far off.  While Obama is showing the feasibility of a small-donor model, it’s hardly replicable , after all, very few candidates are as appealing and captivating as Barack. What Ackerman and Ayres plan would do, hopefully, is incentivize  all candidates to base their campaigns on trying to capture that 3 billion dollar pool of public money.

If Obama were to be elected, he would have quite the coup if he prosposed this plan for the 2012 election.  Also, it would be nice if Lawrence Lessig looked into this, as this plan is a more feasible one than just trying to wish away lobbyist money.

One final note.  I’ve been aware of the anonymous donations idea for years.  My older brother either thought it up or told me about it some time around 2002-2003 (Ackerman’s book was released in 2004). So it should now be called the Ackerman-Ayres-Zeitlin reform.

Ezra Klein points to this chart from the Times showing that while there’s probably some downward effect due to illegal immigrants on wages (it’s hard to imagine an economic model in which increasing the number of workers who a. don’t have much interest in bargaining for higher wages and b. are prevented by their legal status from effectively doing so) the actual data doesn’t really support that it’s solely or even mainly responsible for low wages among low-skilled workers. In fact, the states with the most illegal immigrants seem to have higher wages for low skill workers. Of course, correlation ain’t causation, and I think there’s probably some sort of common response happening.

Illegal immigrants are, almost by definition, the most elastic and mobile labor force in the nation. By even coming to the United States, they’ve shown a willingness to go long distances and incur quite large personal and financial costs and even danger to find jobs. Also, because of their status, they can’t really settle anywhere – ie, they aren’t exactly putting 10% down on a track home in the ‘burbs. So, it makes sense that once they’re within the United States, they would go, and quickly, to where the most jobs and the best pay is for low skilled workers.

The more important part of the research, done by Harvard economists, Lawrence Katz and immigration skeptic David Borjas, shows that the effect of immigrants on wages nationally is really only marginal, especially when you consider that immigrants’ low wages prevent some jobs from leaving the country at all and are really competing with low wage workers in other countries.  Also, illegal immigrants create new markets and because of their low wages, encourage companies to mechanize and invest rather than leave, meaning they can actually hire more people.

And while the article and the research are both really good because they debunk the myth that increased illegal immigration is the main driving force in declining wages for low skilled workers, there’s one thing that is not mentioned once: the gains to the Mexicans that immigrate.  Are they not people too, are their increased benefits not included in our utility calculations, should their gains be mentioned when we talk about immigration’s affect on wages?  Because even if American low wage workers have seen wages fall (without any mention of how immigrants keep prices for staples like food down or the other salutary effects of high immigration) by 4-8%, shouldn’t we at least throw out the fact that an average Mexican illegal immigrant sees his wages go up 450% (two dollars an hour to nine).  I feel like I’m taking crazy pills or something.  In the words of Steven Landsburg, how much is an immigrant’s life worth, exactly?

Chart is below the fold

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So you have a senator that has been in office for 25 years.  He built up support and financing for his initial senate campaign by leaving his first wife and marrying the heiress to the local beer fortune.  Once in office, he became heavily influenced by an unscrupulous banker, who, while engaging in some illegal dealings, encouraged said senator to loosen regulatory strictures that directly affected his business.  About a decade later, he was in some sort of unspecified but close-enough-to-creep-out-his staff relationship with a lobbyist who, even if she didn’t sleep with him, was able to “wag the dog” well enough to get him to endorse legislation in exchange for various favors including campaign contributions and riding around in corporate jets.

Fast forward eight years, the same senator is running for president and, having been in dire financial straits and applied for public financing, is now the front runner and wants to spend more money before the general election actually starts.  The FEC, however, tells him that rules still apply to front runners that the press loves and that he can’t just bail on public financing.  Also, the FEC doesn’t have a quorum, so they can’t officially address the matter, meaning that the senator could be contemplating just forging on ahead on breaking the spending limit despite that, “Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put **** at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison.”

So, this senator sounds pretty sleazy, don’t you think?  Especially sleazy because he had pushed through campaign finance reform and has made his own purity a central issue in every campaign.  Also, the press adores him because of his supposed good government bona fides.  Of course, by now, you know the senator’s name.  It’s none other than John McCain!