Born on Third Base And Thought You Hit A Triple

Patrick Ruffini tries to argue that the GOP repersents the “regular in the sense of apolitical, well grounded in family and community, and as far away from a Beltway mindset as you can get.” Take that one claim for what its worth, but when you look at the evidence that Ruffini uses, you’ll see just how absurd Ruggini’s argument is.

Ruffini’s basic point is that GOP presidential candidates tend not to be lifetime politicians, and developed their political ambitions late in life after sucess in some other field. Democrats, on the other hand, have been involved in politics from a young age and have been scheming for the presidency in their cribs.

For Republicans, there is no contradiction between being an average American with a family, and being a gifted leader. And though Presidents typically exhibit some early ambition, it is usually less prevalent in Republicans than Democrats. Let’s look at the history of the last few Presidential nominations:

• John McCain — probably the most explicitly ambitious of our recent nominees — was first elected to public office at 46 after a career in the military.
• George W. Bush, part of one of the great political families, but “drifted” until later in life; first elected to public office at age 48 after a career in the oil industry
• Bob Dole, the only career politician among recent nominees, was first elected to the Kansas state house at age 27
• George H.W. Bush — successful businessman before winning election to Congress at age 42.
• Ronald Reagan — successful actor before winning his first public office at age 55.

Now look at the Democrats:

• Barack Obama, elected to the Illinois State Senate at age 35, his political ambitions probably date from college
• John Kerry, sailed with Kennedy, ran for Congress at 27, and first elected at 37.
• Al Gore, son of a famous Senator, elected to Congress at 28.
• Bill Clinton, ran for Congress at 28, first elected to public office at 30
• Mike Dukakis, first elected at 29.
• Walter Mondale, campaign manager for Hubert Humphrey at 20, appointed to fill a vacancy at 32.
• Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer, was first elected to the Georgia State Senate at 38. He is probably the last truly normal person the Democrats have nominated.

The contrast between the life experience of our Republican and Democratic political icons is pretty stark. Democrats got their start in politics an average of a decade earlier than the Republicans, winning their first elective office at 33 vs. 44 for the GOP. Most of the Republicans on the list had significant experience in the private sector before entering politics, versus just one Democrat — Jimmy Carter. Another, John McCain, had a full career in the military. In fact, four of five GOP Presidential nominees since 1980 have spent 10 or more years outside of elective office or academia, versus six of seven Democrats who haven’t.

Notice one other difference between the Democratic presidential candidates and the GOP? With the exception of the one lifetime politician, Bob Dole, all the GOP candidates were either born into privileged, political families or actually started their political career much earlier than Ruffini says.

The reason Bush, Bush and MCCain didn’t get into politics in their 20s and 30s was because they didn’t have to.

George HW Bush’s father was Prescott Bush, a very well connected businessman who later went into politics, and was elected to the Senate. HW, because of his position of privilege, didn’t need to work his way up in politics, and was able to run for the House when he was 40. Most politicians (like Humphrey, Mondale, Obama and Clinton) don’t exactly get to start out that way. Because of they didn’t come from wealthy, well connected, political families, they had to start at low levels and work their way up so that they could run for president when they hit middle age.

John McCain came from a very well connected Washington family and too was able to get into politics late because of family connections - this time from his incredibly wealthy wife, whose family generously supported his first senatorial run. It’s also slightly inaccurate to say that McCain started his political career at 46. He was the Navy’s congressional liason when he was 31, a position that he himself described as “real entry into the world of politics and the beginning of my second career as a public servant.”

George W. Bush, well, let me just say that isn’t a sign of normalcy that one could spend the first 40 years of their life drinking and failing at business, only to become governor of Texas at 48.

Reagan is a knotty exception, but Ruffini is making a questionable assertion in saying that he was just an actor before taking office when he was 55. He was head of the Screen Actors Guild in 1946 ( age 35) and after that became a spokesperson for GE. That’s hardly sucess in business, it was instead politicking on behalf of a corporation. The speeches he gave were highly political, and he was removed from his job because of controversy. He then became a full time political activist and was a major, public supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964. He was not some sort of political neophyte when he ran for governor of California in 1967.

But, then again, I guess it’s hardly surprising that a Republican would conflate extreme privilege with normalcy.

What’s A Person? Surely Not A Fetus

In the midst of a long, interesting post about societal definitions of personhood, Megan McArdle claims that “We used to think fetuses were persons, but over the last forty or fifty years, we’ve decided that they aren’t.” By person, McArdle means “is what grants you the basic complement of rights to which everyone is entitled.” If we use the narrowest possible interpretation of that statement, than yes, fetuses were “persons” from the mid 19th century until Roe vs. Wade (pre-quickening abortion has generally been recognized as acceptable until then, no one actually recognized “conception” as having importance from the perspective of personhood). But very few pro-lifers actually seem to view the fetus as a person. After all, don’t the killers of persons (in the case of abortion, doctors and pregnant women) get punished and accused of things like “murder” and “homicide”?

The historical record seems to argue against McArdle’s contention that society really though fetuses (or embryos) were persons.

The earliest laws against abortion weren’t laws against abortion at all, they were instead ban on abortifacients that were commonly taken to prevent pregnancy (or to restore menses, as the woman described it) before quickening. So even then, viability was recognized as legally important, as well as a woman’s bodily and reproductive integrity. This is in marked contrast to the view that many pro-lifers take today, which gives a conceived embryo legal protections. Leslie Reagan wrote in her classic When Abortion Was A Crime, that before 1867, “society” did not conceive fetuses as persons, at least not in the same way modern pro-lifers do:

By the 1840s, the abortion business boomed. Despite the laws forbidding the sale of abortifacients, they were advertised in the popular press and could be purchased from physicians or pharmacists or through the mail. If drugs failed, women could go to a practitioner who specialized in performing instrumental abortions. Advertisements and newspaper exposes made it appear that what had been an occasional domestic practice had become a daily occurrence performed for profit in northern cities. Madame Restell, for example, openly advertised and provided abortion services for thirty-five years. Restell began her abortion business in New York City in the late 1830s; by the mid-1840s, she had offices in Boston and Philadelphia and traveling agents who sold her “Female Monthly Pills.” Restell became the most infamous abortionist in the country, but she was not the only abortionist. The clientele of these busy clinics were primarily married, white, native-born Protestant women of the upper and middle classes.

The idea that the fetus - from conception onward - is a “person” is, at best, a notion that dates to Horatio Storer’s campaign against abortion which began around 1860. He was one of the first to argue against the legal, scientific and medical validity of quickening and probably was the first “pro-lifer” in the modern sense. For example, he was one of the first to call abortion something akin to infanticide; a common equivalence that today’s pro-lifers draw.

Even today, when nearly all pro-lifers profess to believe that the fetus, and even the embryo, is life, are unwilling to go the whole 9 yards of legal personhood. Just look at the National Review symposium following Anna Quindlen’s infamous column in which she asked how many years a woman who procures an abortion should serve. After all, if fetuses are persons, then women who get abortions commit premeditated murder. Most of the respondents, all of whom are ardent pro-lifers, were incredibly reluctant to call women murderers. Some countenanced murder for the doctors, so maybe their only intellectual failing was in viewing women as children who aren’t responsible for their own actions. But shouldn’t abortion doctors, then, be getting the death penalty? Some radical pro-lifers argue that they should, but in the pre-Roe legal regime, I think it was very rare for doctors (and certainly for women) to get the long jail sentences traditionally associated with murderers. Someone like Ruth Barnett, who claimed to have done over 50,000 abortions was never considered by the law as the equivalent to Genghis Khan.

Historically, very few people actually thought a fetus was a “person,” and it’s unclear just how strong the modern pro-life committment to that principle actually is.

Just How Bad Was The Draft?

Ann Friedman writes “Today’s social-justice activists start with very different conditions than those that existed in the 1960s. Yes, the student protests against the Vietnam War shook the country to its core. But it’s not hard to connect the dots between the absence of a draft for the Iraq War and the lack of ongoing protest today.”

This sentiment seems to undermine the righteousness of Vietnam war protestors. They weren’t protesting the inherent wrongness of the War, or the killing of Vietnamese civilians, they were instead looking out for themselves. This argument strikes me not only as wrong, but also as a little offensive to someone (unlike Ann) who could potentially be drafted.

Let’s go back and think about what the draft meant in Vietnam. It mean that young American men would be randomly selected to serve in the military, and to fight in a war that was interminable, unwinnable, founded on lies and directly lead to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. Just under 18,000 American draftees were killed in Vietnam. (For comparison, some 4,100 volunteers have died in Iraq) These were 18,000 young men who had been arbitrarily picked to die in a pointless war. Isn’t that a massive crime, not even withstanding all the other reasons the Vietnam war was wrong? There are few governmental actions more worth protesting than the Vietnam wartime draft.

The reason I write about the draft so passionately is that many on the Left don’t seem to take it seriously enough. David Sirota, for instance, supports a draft because he thinks it would jumpstart an anti-war movement. Sirota probably would never get drafted. I, on the other hand, could very well be cannon-fodder for his double-bankshot plan to build up public opposition to the war. The draft is something that shouldn’t be discussed likely, and opposition to it should never be trivialized. It’s a horrible, offensive, murderous institution that ought to be abolished.

My previous impassioned anti-draft post is here. But if there’s one blogger who’s written great, impassioned stuff about how awful the selective service is, it’s Mike Meginnis.

Justified Wars

Radley Balko has a poll at The Agitator, asking which wars, in retrospect, were justified. I picked the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWII, the Gulf War and Afghanistan.

This, of course, is a tricky question. In 1812, for example, we had a legitimate causus belli, the impressment of neutral American sailors into the British Navy, but we also invaded Canada for no reason, so that one comes out as a wash, and thus, probably not justified.

Korea is also hard. I tend to be a fan of international collective security, and the fact that American troops defending South Korea from an invasion were under the imprimatur of the UN certainly counts for something. But much of the Korean War was unbelievably stupid. In The Coldest Winter, David Halberstam’s history of the conflict, he alleges that MacArthur greatly massaged the intelligence about Chinese cooperation in the conflict, which allowed him to press on past the 38th parallel and the Yalu River, inviting massive Chinese intervention. So I guess the Korean war was half legitimate. With MacArthur’s invasion of North Korea, we still only got to status quo ante, at the cost of tens of thousands of American, Chinese and Korean lives. The appropriate analogy would be had we gone on to Baghdad in the Gulf War. Had that happened, it wouldn’t have gotten my vote.

Much more interesting than my responses are the cumulative totals. Balko obviously has a libertarian leaning readership, but the non-interventionism on display is still quite impressive. The revolutionary war, a war that even libertarians could love, only gets 21%, and WWII gets a mere 19%. It’s no surprise than the purely-imperial wars (Mexican-American, Spanish-American, Philippine-American) get a combined 4 percent, but still, it just goes to show how far out of step hard core non-interventionists are with the American public. In basic US history classes, at least, most wars are taught as being totally awesome (except Vietnam).

BIG FREAKING EDIT/UPDATE: Jeff Darcy points out in the comments that the polling software is simply counting the number of votes, not voters. So even if every respondent picked the Revolutionary War (which, looking at the comments, most did), it wouldn’t get 100%, because of all the other wars people picked too. My bad.

Here’s the link.

Ignoring Black Conservatism

Jamelle already took a few shots at Myron Magnet’s City Journal essay on the supposed revival of “black conservatism” and “shifting the conversation from victimhood to responsibility,” but I think there’s a bit more wrong with his reading of black history:

In the 1960s, this can-do worldview changed. A vast transformation of American culture combined with the black-power movement and the War on Poverty to brew a toxic new orthodoxy among black leaders, who remain stuck in that era to this day. “Very few new ideas are allowed into this stifling echo chamber,” Williams reports. Despite startling African-American progress in the intervening half-century, “the official message from civil rights leaders remains the same. Black people are victims of the system, and the government needs to increase social spending. . . . Even the most dysfunctional and criminal behavior among black people is not to be criticized by black leaders” but must “be denied and hidden in the name of protecting the image of blacks as disadvantaged, oppressed, and perpetually victimized.” Dissent, and you’re an “Uncle Tom and a sellout.”

This is a very common narrative that has a major grain of truth to it. That’s because, before the 1960s, blacks couldn’t play “grievance politics” because no one would listen to their grievances.  For all intents and purposes, blacks were politically non-existent. So, during that time, it was no surprise that elite white people supported Booker T. Washington and that his message of hard work, self reliance and accommodation to the racist state. His message was popular because it was the only message allowed. Of course, many of those who followed Washinton’s advice were literally run out of their homes and businesses, which goes to show why the no-grievance message was rejected.

But even as blacks became much more political (Magnet seems to wish that they weren’t), black conservatism remained vibrant, even revived. Exactly how Magnet can talk about the 60s being a time where blacks transitioned from a can do message to “victimization” without mentioning Malcolm X, or the continuing strength and prevalence of black conservatives withing the black community is rather baffling. Ta-Nehisi Coates has done the best writing on this, of course, and it’s pretty obvious that the black conservative critique has maintained its place in the black community and even reached its zenith of influence and popularity in the early 1970s.

Also, and this is a point made by Coates, Jamelle and others, there never really was a black golden age. The problems of low-wealth, familial breakdown, frayed community bonds and the “pesky legacy of racism and discrimination” have basically ensured that, throughout history, that “for too many black people, things have always been pretty shitty.” And although I agree with many of Magnet’s criticisms of the black community and especially its political leadership, I’ve become incredibly tired of the dichotomy that black conservatives like to draw when writing these essays. Surely we can talk about personal responsibility, black fatherhood, more positive views about education AND the horrors of the drug war, labor market discrimination and all that “victimizing” stuff. It seems like people who are most concerned about the fate of black people, not scoring rhetorical points against their political opponents, would pursue that course…

Contingency

It’s often forgotten what a weird time the late 90s were politically. We had a Congressional majority dedicated to slashing government, a new Democrat president who was open to market reforms, and most importantly, Gingrich had been cut down to size and was perhaps willing to work with Clinton. Also, due to the large surplus, there was a degree of fiscal flexibility and slack that would let the two think widely about their reforms. Fred Siegel’s City Journal review of The Pact captures the scene:

The president agreed that some measure of choice would have to be incorporated into the existing Social Security system in the form of privately managed individual retirement accounts. In return, the speaker agreed to drop his demand for new tax cuts. The two concurred that the retirement age for collecting full Social Security benefits would have to increase. Finally, they decided to form a commission led by Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux, a man trusted by both sides, which would recommend ways to bring private-sector reforms to Medicare. Clinton was to unveil the outlines of the plan on January 27, 1998, in his State of the Union speech. But on January 21, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, and American politics has never fully recovered from that disaster.

One can easily see, with a moderately popular Clinton presidency ending, how all sorts of triangulating reform could have been passed. Although the partial social security privatization may not have been the best idea, there was also a chance to seriously reduce agricultural subsidies during the Clinton-Gingrich detente. For people who like policy (like me!) it would have been interesting times, to say the least. And putting aside the desirability of what Clinton and Gingrich would have cooked up, it’s a good lesson in how random, contingent events can affect the direction of history.

Niall Ferguson and The Victims of Imperialism

Dylan Matthews raised an important point - one needn’t recourse to Kissinger’s Jewishness or his continued prominence to find a good reason to utterly despise the man. One could simply look at his record. Specifically, Indonesia.

What’s utterly infuriating about Ferguson’s review is that he doesn’t mention “Indonesia”, “Suharto” or “East Timor” once. But considering that Ferguson is apparently unable to find a reason beside Kissinger’s ethnic background to explain the Left’s utter contempt for the man, it is worth remembering exactly what happened in East Timor.

To make it simple, in 1975, our loyal ally Suharto wanted to invade East Timor. In December of 75, he met with Ford and Kissinger, and they both made it clear that they supported the invasion. And it wasn’t just words, the United States was the main patron and arms supplier of Suharto and the Indonesian regime up until 1999, when Clinton finally halted arms sales. When Suharto cabled Ford to inform of the invasion, the Indonesian dictator said that “We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action.” Despite the fact that Portugal intended East Timor to be autonomous, Ford replied that “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have.” When they met in Jakarta, Kissinger’s only words of caution were that Suharto should invade after the President and Kissinger returned to Washington, so as to avoid embarrassment.  The Indonesians invaded East Timor the next day. In the first year of the occupation, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Timorese had been killed.  By 1979, 300,000 Timorese had been displaced and shipped into Indonesian military camps. By 1980, between 100,000 and 230,000 Timorese were dead as a result of the invasion and occupation. All of this murder and displacement had been sanctioned and materially supported by the US Government with the explicit approval of Ford and Kissinger.

The closest Ferguson gets to addressing the moral emptiness at the heart of Kissinger’s politics is talking about how the man was a “revolutionary” because he wanted to check Soviet influence in the third world. This, of course, meant supporting the odious, murderous regimes in Indonesia, Pakistan, Chile, South Africa and Argentina (just to give you an idea). For Ferguson, the murder and subjugation of East Timor can simply be explained by saying that “some unpleasant regimes had to be tolerated, and indeed supported” This, of course, is not the first time Ferguson has taken such a blasé attitude towards the massive death tolls that are the inevitable result of the imperialistic realpolitik that he admires so much in Kissinger. Ferguson is the biggest fan of the late British Empire, and has consistently obfuscated, minimized and otherwise excused the massive death tolls that were a direct result of British Imperial policy.

As Johann Hari documented, when Ferguson discusses imperial Kenya (his boyhood home) in The War of the World, there is literally no mention of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and the subsequent network of concentration camps built across Kenya to torture and detain some 300,000 Kenyans. Or of the 50,000 killed, due to the instruction to British soldiers to kill whomever they liked, “so long as he is black.” Ferguson also has a hard time coming to grips with how many Indians were killed by deliberate starvation and imperial negligence. When 29 million Indians died of famine in the 1870s and 1880s, Lord Lytton made it illegal for anyone to feed or assist those dying. Not only did he make relief illegal, he used the military to insist that India export grain to London, even as millions of Indians were dying of starvation. As Amartya Sen has consistently argued, famine did not exist in India before the British arrived, and since they left, there have been no famines on the same scale as the Bengal Famine of 1943 or other, earlier, famines.

But where do these Kenyans, Indonesians or Indians show up in Ferguson grand historical calculus? As usual, the benefits for the imperial powers are all important, while the matter of dead natives is quietly slept under the rug.

Indonesia Links:

George Washington University’s National Security Archive write up of recently released documents relating to the Ford administration’s Indonesia Policy

AFP story from 2001 about said documents.

India Links:

Johann Hari’s first and second articles reviewing Ferguson’s work.

Amartya Sen’s TNR essay on Ferguson British Imperialism in India.

No, That’s Not A Good Thing

In yet another tiresome, “but she’s a woman!” column, Marie Coco laments that Americans are only selectively dynastic:

And we don’t like political wives who strike out on their own. Yet around the world, political spouses, widows and daughters are elected with stunning regularity. Indira Gandhi of India; Corazon Aquino of the Philippines; Violeta Chamorro of Nicaragua; Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan; Cristina Fern¿ndez, the current Argentine president — who succeeded her husband — all rose to power through family connections.

She goes on to say that any committment to anti-dynasticism is highly selective - just look at our current president. And she’s right, but that doesn’t justify us trying to imitate the countries she lists. Doesn’t it seem obvious that any argument which begins with “our political system should be more like Pakistan’s!” is probably a bad one? I’ll be the first to admit how distressing it is that America seems almost uniquely uncomfortable with women, and wouldn’t mind if we had some sort of informal (or formal) quota for the number of women in the House, but presidential elections are too damn consequential, and Clinton has too many negatives to let her gender tip the balance.

There Are Conservatives, And Then There Are Republicans

Professor Bainbridge seems to confuse the two:

To me, this is basically wrong headed. I can’t think of anything more contrary to the spirit of Burkean conservatism than a seach for the “next big thing.” Indeed, I would argue that a large part of the problem with modern conservatism is that Bush and the K Street Gang were more concerned with finding something big to do than with standing athwart history shouting stop.

Instead, it is the Libertarians and the progressives who are Big Idea people. Despite their obvious differences in philosophy, they share the absurd belief that if only their big idea(s) came to pass, society would inexorably progress towards some ideal.

In contrast, I stand with Buckley (”Don’t let ideologues try to create heaven on earth, because they’ll deprive us of freedom and make things a lot worse”) and Bill Bonner (”Traditional American conservatism was not a doctrine of world improvement, but a mood of skepticism toward all “isms” and empire builders”).

Bainbridge is spouting the typical Kirkian line: that conservatism is a temperament which prefers existing institutions, is suspicious of rapid change and generally doesn’t trust human reason to guide us through most problems. Now, this is a fine temperament, one that is very well represented in art, philosophy and literature. What it isn’t, however, is a guide to practical politics. What’s a Kirkian supposed to do about the fact that all the ideas of the conservative party are not particularly popular, and that unless they can adjust from their current combination of tax cut orthodoxy, environmental no-nothingness, cultural reaction and support for a failed war, then a progressive force is going to come in and really screw things up from a Kirkian or traditional conservative perspective?

Bainbridge notes that big ideas (in which he ludicrously groups compassionate conservatism, deconstructionism and Fascism) are generally anti-conservative, and that instead, conservatives should follow “A people’s historic continuity of experience.” Now, one may wonder, in terms of policy, exactly what the hell that means. Where does our continuity of experience come down on climate change or on income taxes?

But more importantly from the perspective of what the GOP ought to do is that since the 1950s, conservatives have never been particularly conservative. So while Buckley may talked about standing athwart history and yelling stop, his political movement was all about promoting a certain type of progress. They didn’t advocate that we simply press pause in 1964, instead they proposed radically rolling back the role of the state, drastically cutting taxes, deregulating the economy, expanding the military and switching our posture vis a vis communism from containment to rollback. These were all radical changes that conservatives proposed, and so it made sense that when this perspective was actualized in the Reagan presidency, it was called the Reagan Revolution, not the Reagan Return To Our Continuity of Experience.

Today, the Conservative Revolution has mostly run out of steam because many of its basic precepts as far as taxes and the role of the state goes, have been accepted by the mainstream and plenty of Democrats since the 1990s. So maybe they don’t need some “big idea” or a grand unifying theme, but they need something, and asking “what would Kirk or Burke do” won’t get them very far.

Can I Call It Ambivalence About Fair Pay Day?

Via Feministing, I see that today is Blog For Fair Pay Day. And since I haven’t written about Fair Pay in a while, I feel now is a good time to rehash my thoughts at some length.

The first question of Fair Pay is what does it mean. At its most basic, it means equal pay for equal work. In simple terms, the implication is that a man and a woman, doing the same job, should get roughly equal compensation. And so discriminating hiring practices, discriminating promotion practices, firing women because they’re pregnant and so and so forth are violations of this principle. And, fortunately, this principle is enshrined in the law. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t under fire. The Supreme Court, in Ledbetter v Goodyear, made it much more difficult for women to file pay-discrimination suits. The Court did, however, open the door to Congress making the statute more amenable to women suing under it. So despite the Court’s horribly reactionary decision, Title VII and the Equal Pay Act, which protect women from pay discrimination for the same work, are still on the books and can be strengthened by Congress, and probably will be if a Democratic president is elected.

But the principle of Equal Pay, notwithstanding the Court, is not what today is all about. Instead, it’s about Fair Pay. What Fair Pay aims at is not explicit pay discrimination, but the actual pay gap between men and women. And the pay gap is real. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2006, women earned 81 cents for every dollar men earned. To give some historical perspective, in 1979, women were earning 63 cents on the male dollar. So the question becomes, is this gender gap ipso facto unfair, and if so, what are we to do about it?

Most advocates for Fair Pay say that the gap is the result of two trends. One is that women are paid less because of their tendency to drop out the workforce due to pregnancy and motherhood. This means that more women drop out of the labor force in their most productive years or go to part time, which drives their hourly and total wages down. Because women tend to flock to careers that allow them to have more flexible schedules - teaching and nursing are good examples - the wages in those jobs tend to be low. There’s also the fact that women “pick” certain career paths. For example, men make up a huge majority of the highest paying college majors, while women are predominate in the liberal arts. Adding up these three factors – fewer hours, fewer years in the work force and different career paths - June O’Neil found that 97.5% of the wage gap could be attributed to their aggregate effect.

The second factor that Fair Pay advocates point to is systemic sexism in how society values certain occupations. They see the fact that nurses, teachers and receptionists get paid less not as evidence that, due to the productivity of their work as well as the supply and demand of labor, they get paid less than plumbers, but instead of a deep institutional injustice directed against women. The principle is no longer “equal pay for the same work” but “equal pay for equivalent work.” They remedy for this in the 1970s, when the concept of fair pay first emerged, was that the government would measure the “worth” of each profession, and declare which ones would be equal. So if nurses and plumbers in a hospital were doing “equivalent” work, then they would have to be paid the same. Only this way could we correct the societal prejudice that makes women financially inferior to men.

The problems with this old-school, Comparable Worth approach are obvious. We know from Hayek, as well as from the historical failure of central planning, that government is not very good at determining market imputs, to make them fair or to achieve any other goal. There is simply too much that goes into a payment decision, that the government couldn’t possibly say what’s fair for a specific job. This bureaucratization of the labor market would inevitably distort it, making it harder for women to get jobs in specifically female professions like teaching and nursing because the wages were at above a market equilibrium level. When wages are artificially forced too high, employers hire fewer people. There could also be the problem of the wages for certain productive or societally useful work getting “equalized down” so that its wages could be “fair” compared to “equivalent” woman’s work. If doctors were mandated to get paid less, or oil rig workers, we would have fewer people entering these professions. It’s been very rare where the market hasn’t, on average, done the best at determining aggregate utility.

Because of the myriad practical and political problems with Comparable Worth proposals, as they were called, Fair Pay advocates have come up with new ideas. The most widely supported Fair Pay proposal these days is the Fair Pay Act. The Act, which was co-sponsored by Barack Obama, would be based around class action suits which would claim that women were getting underpaid for equivalent work, within the same company. For example, under the Fair Pay Act, social workers could sue to get equal pay with Parole Officers, or nursing assistants would be equal pay with plumbers in a hospital. The Act would ask courts to evaluate whether jobs’ “composite of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are equivalent in value” and then rule that a company would be engaging in sex discrimination by paying the majority female workers less. The Act also would prohibit lowering the pay of one class of workers to make the pay equal.

But while the content of the Fair Pay Act is quite different from past comparable worth proposals, it still rests on the same assumption - that gaps in pay are not the result of the free functioning of the labor market, but instead is the result of the variety of sexist factors. For example, the concept of a “family wage”, whereby women in traditionally female jobs are paid less because it’s assumed they have husbands who are also working. The Act’s advocates also claim that women are steered into lower paying jobs because women are more likely to take time off for pregnancy and childrearing.

There are certain pay-gap facts that are undeniable, the most obvious being the existence of it. So what are we to do? The Fair Pay Act, despite its vast improvements over Comparable Worth, still retains some basic flaws. If the pay patterns that result in women earning less are the results of society wide problems such as women being more likely to take responsibility for raising children, then intervening at such a late stage is probably only going to distort the labor market. If employers are worried that if they hire nurses, they will have to pay them at an above market wage, they’ll hire fewer nurses. And if the factors that drive women into nursing are still present, then Fair Pay won’t accomplish much at all.

But the wage gap is still a problem, so what are we to do? In my view, we keep doing the same things that we have been trying to do for decades. The first thing we must do is eliminate, or alleviate, the motherhood penalty. Since much of the gap can be attributed to fewer hours, fewer years in the work force and different job choices among women, it’s unclear if trying to intervene so late in the game will do much, especially considering the distortions it brings. But what all those three factors have in common is motherhood. So we ought to be doing all we can to make it so mothers can participate in the work force. This means more paid maternity leave, more paternity leave, more child care, more pre-K and doing the slow, hard work of trying to change social norms so that more men will stay at home. This also means that, a la Linda Hirshman, more women ought to work full-time and insist that society and family life adjust to their preferences. As far as getting more women into higher paying jobs goes, there need to be more grassroots efforts for woman to get interested in the sciences and math. The evidence that inherit aptitude is responsible for the dearth of female engineering majors is weak, especially compared to the role that assumptions about women’s ability and the intimidating atmosphere that competitive, functionally all-male academic programs can provide.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Fair Pay isn’t easy, and that no one-off law or amendment will ensure that they pay gap goes away. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

Nope, Mark Penn Is Still Bad News - And Always Was

Josh Patashnik does the unthinkable and defends Penn:

His own views aside, he’s shown a remarkable ability to shepherd his candidates into line with the prevailing political zeitgeist: in the middle during the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it ’90s, further left now in reaction to Bush’s failures. If the Clinton campaign had simply assigned Penn the task of broad ideological positioning and kept him as far away as possible from conference calls, television cameras, and electoral strategy, things might look a lot better for Hillary now. (Granted, that’s not worth the millions of dollars Clinton was paying him, but still.)

I suppose I’d also like to put in a defense for the specific brand of politics Penn pursued in 1996, which Schmitt describes as “dreary low point for the nation’s politics.” Penn ran that campaign the way Princeton used to win basketball games, and there’s a good deal of beauty in both. I suspect most Americans wouldn’t mind having the politics of 1996 back–sleazy donors and all–if we could have the economy and global landscape of 1996 back too. Boring elections and domestic tranquility go hand in hand, and there are far worse fates for a nation to suffer than voter apathy.

Patashnik seems to have worked himself into a corner. If the mid 90s were a time of “domestic tranquility” and a roaring economy, why did Clinton need to run such a small-bore, unambitious campaign and second term in office? After all, it’s historically very easy for a president to win reelection, especially if the economy is roaring. And yet Clinton - under the guidance of Penn- managed to win the election by a smaller than predicted margin and had no ambitious policy agenda to show for it. I don’t think that Penn was “adapting to the times” when he counseled a determined move to the center and the abandoning of anything resembling a liberal policy agenda (contrary to every other two term Democrat in the 20th century*). He was instead revealing his own ideological preferences for appealing to those same white, middle-class voters that he loves so much. This is the Mark Penn that is notorious for pigeonholing polling data to support his own political and ideological agenda rather than looking at the polls and then thinking of a strategy.

But Patashink points out that in these heady anti-Bush times, Penn counseled a more left-wing message for Hillary. But Penn doesn’t get leftie points for this; of course Democrats are running explicitly against Bush. The question is which candidate, on the margins, is trying to win with “limited, essentially conservative messages.” And that candidate is unquestionably Clinton. It was Penn who wanted to center the campaign around “experience,” - and in a time when some 80% of the country says we’re on the wrong track, the “experience” pitch is a conservative one indeed. There’s also the fact that Penn was the one aggressively pushing for more fear-mongering by the campaign, which is an essentially conservative tactic. He not only thought up the 3 AM ad, his original version of it was even more negative. So even in a close contest with the Democrats being relatively unified on pursuing a progressive agenda, Mark Penn has still been marginally more conservative and incredibly odious.

*I count Johnson’s 64-68 term as a “second term.”

Favorite Founder

Radley Balko is posing the question, and I have to say that my favorite founding father is…Alexander Hamilton. Yes, the founder of American conservatism, yes, the prick who detested democracy and tried to overthrow the government at least twice. The reason I like Hamilton the most is that unlike other founding fathers, namely those prissy Virginia aristocrats like Jefferson or Washington, he was an entirely self made man. He was born an illegitimate child in Caribbean, came to America after being essentially orphaned, went to Columbia. He was also a forerunner of bloggers, seeing as the Federalist Papers were written both anonymously and serially (with Madison of course). He was America’s first urbanist, recognizing that the future of the country was in cities, as opposed to with Jefferson’s archaic yeoman farmers. And despite the constitution’s many anti-majoritarian flaws, it was still a much better document that the Articles of Confederation, and Hamilton played a huge role in its passing. And while not quite an abolitionist or a racial egalitarian, he was much closer to transcending the racial barbarism of his time than many contemporaries.

But all these accomplishments aren’t why I like Hamilton so. I like Hamilton because he was an almost literary figure. He clearly had the most drive, highest IQ and the most competence among any of the founders, but because he was prickly, unlikable and not an aristocrat, he never was able to realize a huge amount of power or fame. He was the nation’s first, and ultimate, technocrat - a kind of proto Gene Sperling, if you will. Like Edmund in King Lear, he was probably frustrated by his high intelligence and seemingly being stymied by the knaves around him so it led to a lot of resentment and the planning of coups. None of this excuses the innumerable flaws he had too, but he was certainly an interesting guy.

For more on the why the Hamiltonian policy agenda is not one liberals should be looking back fondly on, this Boston Review article is pretty good.

PS - Balko also included Thomas Paine in his poll, which I must dispute. Although Thomas Paine is a very admirable historical figure for being such a steadfast believer in individual rights as well as secularism, he wasn’t a “founder.” It’s true that Common Sense was influential in getting many Americans to support independence, but Paine didn’t do any heavy lifting in the actual Revolutionary war or in establishing governmental institutions - the two things that generally constitute the “Founding.”

Isn’t It Weird How Smart Republicans Disagree With McCain?

Let me just say how happy I am that McCain isn’t listening to David Frum.  Because we all know that playing to the base when all the core elements of your party’s appeal are losing popularity is the right thing to do.  That’s why we Democrats had the glorious run of Carter-Mondale-Dukakis…oh wait.

That’s Not What A President Does

If Hillary Clinton has so much White House experience, why would she make an ad implying that presidents often make really important decisions at 3 AM, when they just about never do? Well, I’ll let you speculate, but you should first read Michael Abramowitz’s Post article looking at the history of late-night calls:

 A sleeping Ronald Reagan was alerted early in the morning to what turned out to be the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian passenger plane. George H.W. Bush was informed after he went to bed of an apparent coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Bill Clinton received word in the middle of the night that negotiations had broken down in the case of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy whose relatives were battling the federal government to prevent him from returning home.

But in none of these cases were presidents asked to make major decisions. Instead, former White House advisers say, these calls — and countless others like them — were largely aimed at keeping the president informed of critical developments, particularly ones that might cause embarrassment if the public learned that a commander in chief had slept through the episode undisturbed.

“In my experience, I cannot think, off the top of my head, of a snap decision that had to be made in the middle of the night,” said Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state and national security adviser. In fact, he said in an interview, “I think that one should reduce the number of snap decisions to be made.”

If even Henry Kissinger thinks your form of fear mongering has gone too far and is too unrealistic, then you’re clearly way off the reservation.  But this is classic Clinton.  She constantly promotes a model of the presidency whereby it all consists of snap decisions in which one has to be as hawkish as possible, or else you’re just naive.  It makes sense that a hawk, or someone who wants to be seen as a hawk, would try to portray the presidency this way.  It’s in times of conflict that snap decisions are supposedly necessary.  If, however, you use your waking hours as president to formulate policies and make decisions that will prevent conflict, there will be less need for 3am phone calls and the like.  But it’s hard to scaremonger your way into the White House by talking about sound, long-term judgment in foreign policy matters, so Clinton decided to just fabricate the situations presidents find themselves in.

What Category Error?

I’m a liberal, I think government should do all sorts of things like regulate businesses, provide health care, subsidize wages, provide a safety net, tax carbon emissions, invest in green technology etc etc etc.  Am I a liberal fascist?  Am I committing a category error in thinking that our government can do things that most Western governments can do?  Jonah Goldberg thinks so:

This gets us to an important point that I haven’t discussed too much around here. People ask me why I’ve become more libertarian because of writing this book. The simple answer is that the one thing libertarians grasp better than conservatives or liberals is the danger of the category error when it comes to the role of government. While there are certainly plenty of radical individualists swelling the ranks of libertarianism, libertarianism is not in fact an ideology of radical individualism. Or at least it need not be. The fundamental insight of libertarianism is that the government is the government. It cannot be your mommy, your daddy, your big brother, your nanny, your friend, your buddy, your god, your salvation, your church or your conscience. It is the government. A big bureaucracy charged with certain responsibilities, some of which it is qualified to carry out, many of which it is not.

There’s a small point of agreement I have with Goldberg here.  I get creeped out when people start talking about the federal government as a method to create greater national unity, common purpose, establish a cultural glue or anything like that.  It just so happens that most of this rhetoric comes from conservatives and centrists.  It’s national greatness conservatives who have an outsize conception of government, it’s those who look at the War on Terror as a way to unite the populace around a common purpose, it’s those who want a draft or mandatory national service, it’s those that see the government’s role as policiing the culture who are objectionable.  Liberals, or at least liberals who I like, are a technocratic sort who don’t’ really see government as anything more than a tool with which to advance certain liberal goals like equality of opportunity, substantive equality, fairness and, in general, justice.

Nowhere in, say, a  nationalized health system, or at least one with heavy governmental involvement, is there an implication that the  government is “your mommy, your daddy, your big brother, your nanny, your friend, your buddy, your god, your salvation, your church or your conscience.”  In fact, it’s because “it’s the government” that liberals like it for initiatives like health care of environmental protection - it just so happens that government qua government is good at some things.

One thing that good, honest intellectuals do is contend with the strongest version of their opponents position.  Now, very few consistently doing this, but Goldberg’s condemnation of modern, technocratic left-liberalism is a great example of picking the most extreme , objectionable case and then condemning everything similiar to it.  Sure, “The Moral Equivalent of War” (but, of course, real war is much worse) is a scary document, and communitarianism kinda freaks me out, but to
say that America’s liberalism, which has a heavy strain of individualism, pragmatism and market-orientation, is some kind of early 20th century Progressive fantasy ideology might be described as…committing a category error.

Not Totally Unreasonable

I should put this out there before I defend some of Chavez’s antics:  I think he is a demagogic, authoritarian minded, wannabe-dictator who, while opening up Venezuela’s politica culture in a good way, is likely to leave Venezuela’s isntitutions damaged and economy poorer.  But I think Megan is wrong to say that his warning of the US intervening in the Colombia-Venezueula-Ecuador squabble is totally off-the-wall and stupid.

McArdle, having attended an American, four year university, surely knows of the signs, posters, and t-shirts listing dozens of American military and political interventions into Latin America in the last 100 or so years.  Even listening to a Rage Against the Machine album would give you the bare bones history.  Surely I don’t need to recount how many coups we’ve staged, rebellions we’ve helped squash, corporate interests we’ve supported and just all the general crap we’ve afflicted on Latin America.  And for Chavez, fear of US intervention isn’t all that unreasonable.  There are plenty of well-respected voices in the conservative world (Rick Santorum, for instance) who think that Venezuela is the staging ground for Red Dawn II. There’s also the little incident of American recognizing and maybe supporting an attempted coup against Chavez perpretrated by oil oligarchs and the military in response his oil nationalization push in 2002.

Now, I think that the probability of real US intervention in this squabble is about nil, not counting the billions of dollars we give in military aid to support Colombia’s counter-insurgency efforts against the FARC.  And Chavez is certainly talking about US intervention so that he can rally the Venezuelan populace against a foreign enemy.  But the reason such appeals are effective is because the history of US intervention in Latin America is very real.

Buckley Links

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.

William F. Buckley Jr, RIP

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.

They Were Going to Lose Anyway

This American Spectator piece entreating Republican candidates to embrace the base and run to their right is pretty sloppy.  Jeffrey Lord uses the elections of 1940, 44, 48, 60, 72 and 92 as his examples.  The one thing you’ll notice immediately about all those dates is that they were times of liberal ascendancy, during which either conservatism as a movement didn’t really exist or had exhausted itself after 12 years and had a democratic candidate who adopted many of the themes and ideas of the Reagan years.  But let’s get specific.

In 1940, there was FDR implementing his popular New Deal programs and the hard-right conservatives, to the extend that they existed, were floundering nationally because of their callousness to the concerns of people who suffered through the depression.  The reason Wendall Wilkie didn’t run to the right in that election was that he was running for president during America’s liberal revolution, so he would have lost by even a greater margin by “embracing the base.”

In 1944, all the trends from 1940 were at play AND there was a world war going on.  And Americans are loath to kick out a president during a war, especially one that was truly massive and was being won.  So Dewey could hardly sell to Americans that he would take away all their social programs AND change the leadership in the middle of the War.  So, once again, he lost because he was going to lose anyway.

1948 was similar to 40 and 44 but probably a more winnable elections for the Republicans.  Despite the popularity of the New Deal and Roosevelt’s war accomplishments, Truman himself was seen as underwhelming.  But, once again, it was still tough for a true conservative to win then because liberalism was ascendant.  It also didn’t help that Truman ran a genuinely great campaign to beat expectations and win.

1960 - This example is silly for a few reasons.  One, it was an incredibly close election and Kennedy probably stole it or at least pulled some sort of underhanded shenanigans in Illinois, so it was hard to say that Nixon really screwed the pooch on this one at all.  Secondly, like 40,44 and 48, trying to run as a conservative in liberal times was never going to be successful.  Eisenhower, of course, was as milquetoast a conservative as could be and people were enthralled with the labor-liberal, middle class state created out of the New Deal.  No conservative was going to arrest that trend in 1960.

1976 - Again, any republican candidate was going to lose.  I don’t know if Lord remembers, but it was “conservative Nixon” who had decided to ignore that pesky thing called the rule of law and shame the country.

1992 and 1996 - Running against Bill Clinton was always difficult.  And capturing the Ross Perot vote by going farther to the right probably wouldn’t have helped, considering that his prime issues were NAFTA, the deficit and appealing to the politically disenchanted.

I guess my point is that there are times when it makes sense to run as a true conservative.  And those times were 1968, 1980, 1984 and 1988.   One time where it makes no sense in 2008. Democrats hold generic leads on just about every issue and the main conservative project (Iraq) is incredibly unpopular.  The 50+1 strategy of Rove was a relic of a time when evangelicals still liked the party and the war on terror was a big vote getter.  Neither of those are really true anymore, so the idea that a GOP candidate can run to the right, shore up the base and scare the rest of the voters into the booth probably won’t work.

If Hillary Takes Credit for the Clinton Years, Can We Talk About Them?

I agree with Minipundit that Stephen Suh’s tirade denouncing all criticism of Bill Clinton as anti-Democratic is extremely weird.  While he’s certainly right that much of the right-wing/media disdain for the Clintons is hardly something that Democrats should endorse, he’s just brutally wrong when he says, “President Bill Clinton and his term are off-limits.”

Suh is wrong on two levels.  The first is merely a question of how the campaign plays out.  In case he hasn’t noticed, Hillary Clinton is running on the achievements of the Clinton presidency and much of the support she gets - and she explicitly says this - is based on nostalgia for the 90s and the Clinton years.  Much of her claims of “experience” are based on the fuzzy impression that A. Things were good in the 90s B. Clintons were in the White House so C. Hillary had something to do with how good things were.  Even more importantly on the operational level, Bill Clinton is not only furiously campaigning for Clinton, but we’re essentially being told that Bill will have a key role in the White House.  This makes criticism of Bill not only permissible, but also necessary, for Obama.  If Bill is going to be a co-president, or even just a very important adviser and envoy, then his secretly arranging Kazakh mining deals in exchange for a huge donation to his foundation - and other behavior of that ilk -  is totally fair game for Obama.

But Suh is a smart guy, and so he’s well aware of everything I just said.  But what’s more interesting is whether there’s a more general, ideological/political criticism that Democrats should be making of the Clinton years.  While I don’t much agree with this perspective, among the netroots and many progressives, there’s a case to be made that the Clinton presidency was a time of compromise, capitulation and even selling out the left-wing of the party and not doing very much to pursue progressive goals.  One of the main causes of the netroots/progressives has been to remake the Democratic party so that it doesn’t, in the words of Mark Schmitt, see Democratic governance as a “a way of accommodating liberalism to a hostile political environment.”  The Clinton years were all about fear of being seen as too far to the left - in case we forgot, both Bill and Hillary chaired the DLC.  Obama, on the other hand, isn’t scared and/or dishonest about liberalism and instead of governing based on fear of being too far to the left, wants to build the Democratic coalition with a more progressive platform.  And when we look at the flier that Suh takes such umbrage at, it doesn’t talk about Buddhist Temples, Ron Burkle or the Defense of Marriage Act; instead, Obama points out that between 1992 and 2000, Democrats suffered heavy losses in the House, Senate and in statehouses.  Now, this wasn’t all Clinton’s fault - something like the Gingrich revolution was inevitable - but when Hillary is running as the candidate of 90s nostalgia, her and her husband’s failure to build a sustainable, governing majority is a rather signifigant demerit, and Obama should be able to maintain his credentials as a good Democrat and still be able to point this out.

Suh is starting to sound awfully Republican with his insistence that our past leaders are above reproach.  We make fun of the GOP for being the party of Zombie Reagan, so we probably shouldn’t try to become the party of Zombie Clinton.