I feel I’m taking the standard liberal line when I say that I’m quite sad for Jesse Helms’ family about his passing, but I also thought the day he left the Senate was one of the happier days of my poliitcal life. He was, unquestionably, the most sucessful openly racist politician in a time when blatant racism was supposed to be a disqualifer from participation in public life. Not only did he hold bigoted views towards black people, he also was responsible for the HIV ban, had an enduring hate for multilateral institutions and a certain fondness for reactionary right-wing governments abroad. He was, in short, the apothoseosis of everything wrong about Republicans from 1964 onwward.
But he was also a relic. In the past few years, there’s been a flourishing of commentary among liberals about how Republicans used white racism (or resentment, if you want to be nicer about it) to maintain political dominance from 1968 to 1992. Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal and, to a lesser extent, Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, are good examples of this trend. The weird part about this commentary is that it comes as the very same time that mainy powerful Republicans are openly trying to overcome this legacy.
In 2000, Bush became the first Republican to win the White House since Eisenhower who didn’t rely on some implicit fear of black people/crime/urban disorder to win support. He didn’t give any speeches in Philadelphia, MIssissippi, ran no Willie Horton ads and even made a point of reaching out to black and Hispanic voters. Ken Mehlman even made a public apology to african americans for the GOP legacy on race. Karl Rove had a grand political strategy that involved shaving off some blacks and lots of Latinos from the Democratic coalition. Of course, by 2004, there was plenty of fear-mongering as well as reliance on homophobia to whip up votes, but it would be dishonest to ignore the progress the GOP made since 2000. This was also the period when open racism (against black people) finally became a disqualifier for being a powerful Republican. Trent Lott was forced out of his minority leadership, while Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms both retired.
So why are so many mainstream Republican and conservative figures and organizations rushing to defend and praise Helms? The core of the Republicans agenda these days (terrorism and social issues) isn’t the same mix (crime, urban disorder, states rights) that invited a reaching out to anti-black racists. And while I agree with Mark Schmitt that Republicans are banking on a certain type of white/”American” identity politics these days, it’s still markedly different from the subtle and sometimes not so subtle race baiting of Nixon, Reagan, Helms et al. Part of it is quite easy to explain: you simply don’t let your opponents define your political movement in the worst possible terms. But still, Jesse Helms is not very relevant to what the GOP is doing today, and if the conservative movement ever wants to shake its reputation for racism, a full throated denunciation of the most openly racist Republican of the late 20th century would be a good place to start.
PS - This would be a good oppurtunity to link to David Weigel’s excellent essay on Helms. The crucial point Weigel makes is that Helms wasn’t a very effective politician - North Carolinians didn’t like him for bringing home pork or any traditional legislative achievements, they liked him because he hated liberals and liberals hated him. He really was the purest form of conservative resentment that made it into real politics.
There’s even more news that Obama is considering picking Sam Nunn as his Veep nominee. And that news is distressing. To put it quickly - Sam Nunn is really old, not very liberal, main opponent of dropping the gay ban and was the main proponent of DADT. I’d love see Nunn in the Obama administration working on issues related to defense and nonproliferation, but it’s just ridiculous to award the number two position in both the country and the Democratic party to someone who’s unacceptable to a major part of the Democratic coalition.
Of course, I’m not the only one who feels this way, and my friend Dylan Matthews has even done some organizing for the anti-Nunn cause. So check out havingnunnofit.com and send a message to Eric Holder and David Plouffe that Nunn is just a bizarre, unacceptable choice for VP.
It’s quite unfortunate that so often, ones support for open, free trade is simply an accounting of what trade agreements that candidate supports. And while there is a correlation between supporting bilateral trade agreements and supporting more free trade generally, they are very much not the same. For one, bilateral FTAs often mimic the worst aspect of protectionist policies: they tend to reflect certain industries or preferences in the realm of things like IP protection, and because of their relatively small-bore nature, they are easy to manipulate (you think the sugar industry is taking a big hit with CAFTA? Dream on brother). Also, whether or not we sign an FTA with another small country is unimportant when it comes to the question of global trade liberalization. Tariffs are already pretty low on most of the stuff we buy from most of our major trading partners, and the big barrier to further integration is agricultural subsidies, which bilateral FTAs never reduce. So the question for free traders becomes two-fold: who can reinvigorate Doha, and who can reduce agricultural subsidies? (the questions are, of course, interrelated)
John McCain, I’m sorry to say, is way ahead on both of these fronts. He voted against the farm bill and keeps on saying what an avid free trader he is. But he doesn’t appear to be approaching the issue in a very sophisticated way. I was watching Bloomberg this morning with my dad, and McCain was talking about a free trade agreement between the EU and the US. This isn’t a particularly serious proposal, seeing as tariffs on manufactured goods are already low and that the major barrier to the Doha round isn’t tariffs (though the annual trade-flare up between the two blocs doesn’t help), but the high agricultural subsidies in both the EU and the US. And since the pressure for subsidy reduction comes from middle-sized states like Indonesia and Brazil, there’s no reason to think that the US and EU would agree to reduce their own subsidies in an agreement that they were the only parties to. McCain’s proposal for an EU-USA FTA is to free traderism as Mitt Romney’s “double Gitmo” statement was to conservative national security policy: something that signals support for a particular vision, but isn’t a serious policy option to be implemented.
Obama’s proposals to renegotiate NAFTA are similar: a totally radical, silly suggestion that will never come to fruition. But the signaling effect is still worrying, but it’s still only a signal. HIs rhetoric could be much, much worse. Considering that most economists say that NAFTA was essentially a wash (marginally positive, but nothing too special), tinkering with it won’t be the end of the world. There’s also much more protectionist rhetoric out there that Obama could be using. For example, he could be supporting something along the line of a 27.5% tariff on Chinese goods. Even having a presidential candidate talk about such a bad policy could very well be a disaster, and there are many people in the Democratic coalition who want Obama to make movies like that.
Also, trade skepticism is, ironically, the post partisan issue. One can look at how Lou Dobbs is popular among both liberals and conservatives, that the most sucessful third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt ran on a protectionist platform, or that 60% of Republicans say that trade has been bad for the US and support restrictions on foreign imports (Dan Drezner has done good scholarly work on this question). In short, if Obama is the voice of trade populism in a time where foreign trade’s public and scholarly reputation has never been lower, that could be reason for some sort of optimism.
Obama seems to be caught up in his own web of spin, pandering and honest convictions. Centrist, trade oriented elites in the media and think tank world won’t forgive him for his NAFTA rhetoric, while the Sirotas and labor-types don’t think he’s gone far enough. I think it’s very possible that Obama doesn’t really know what he thinks about trade, or at least what the most politically palatable messaging for his vision is.
So when Roger Lowenstein says that Obama will have to walk back his protectionist rhetoric because our low-dollar induced surge in exports, it’s unclear what exactly Lowenstein thinks will happen in an Obama administration. Brad Delong put it best, “Whether we get export-led growth depends 100% on the value of the dollar and 0% on whether we conclude new trade agreements.”
It could be very well that I’m desperately searching for ways to give Obama a pass on rhetoric and policies I find highly objectionable, but I also think there’s considerable nuance that, when ignored, does not serve free traders very well.
I know that since Obama has wrapped up the nomination, there’s really no reason to pursue recriminations, but the GOP-like cultural attacks that many Clinton supporters made just can’t be forgotten. That’s because anytime someone criticizes “latte sippers” “the creative class” ” the wine-track” or uses any other slur for the professional, educated, urban base of the Democratic party, they are playing the Ace of Spades in Richard Nixon’s pack of resentment. These attacks can never be productive, because Republicans will just about always win the cultural resentment game. And it just makes it easier for them if they can claim to be merely echoing disaffected Democrats like Lanny Davis, Evan Bayh and her allies in the blogosphere did it for them.
My friend John Cain has an excellent wrap-up of pro-Clinton bloggers use of this inane and counterproductive rhetoric.
Chris Hayes, quoting Steve Clemons, voices the left wing critique of Obama’s Furman pick:
But calling a spade a spade, it’s clear that Furman is no Dean Baker or Robert Blecker or Jared Bernstein—all important economists who have been far more right as of late than the Rubin crowd in anticipating the stress points in globalization, the housing bubble, trade, and the like.
Good point! Would it be asking too much for the Obama campaign to bring someone on board its paid economic policy team that brings with them an unabashed left-liberal perspective?
I think Will Wilkinson makes a good point on the politics/optics of this pick - at this point, Obama doesn’t really need to reassure those who want an “unabashed left-liberal perspective,” but instead throw some meat towards centrists who are likely to be impressed with Furman’s all around awesomness (oh yeah, and centrist/Brookings cred). And while I’ve come more around to the Baker/Bernstein crowd, it’s unclear if Obama really is closer to them than he his to Rubin/Furman types. After all, his initial economic policy ad visor was Austan Goolsbee, whose support for free trade caused no end of consternation for the campaign. Also, Furman made some noises about consulting with and talking to Bernstein and Jamie Galbraith, whose leftiness can not be impeached:
“My key mandate, which came directly from the senator, is to bring him a diverse set of voices and ideas, because that’s the kind of debate he likes to hear to make up his mind about his economic agenda,” Furman said. He named Rubin, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder as advisers the campaign would turn to.
It’s also important to note that the real policy space between the Summers/Rubin/Furman wing and the Bernstein/Galbraith/Baker wing has decreased radically in the past eight years. At this point, they can all agree on higher taxes on the rich, increased public investments, some form of universal health and increased regulation in the financial industry. Of course, there are detailed and marginal differences which matter greatly, and my aggregation of a wide range of policy thinkers into two groups is inevitably obscuring some crucial distinctions, but I think we can all agree that we are basically past the Rubin-Reich feuding that marked the Clinton years.
At this point, the central difference of outlook on trade seems almost stylistic. That’s because there’s very little good evidence to support the general left wing critique of trade (as opposed to specific trade agreements), namely, that it lowers wages for the lower and working classes. BUT, at the same time, the political support for anything resembling an ambitious trade agenda has totally collapsed. For one, there’s no way Doha is happening anytime soon, and those liberal advocates for free trade have come to realize that bilateral FTAs do little to bring about the global trading environment we desire, but do a lot to impose US standards on things like IP on smaller, weaker countries. So, hopefully, there can be rapprochement between the two sides - at least until Obama is in the White House, then they’ll start fighting again.
Ezra Klein reports that Jason Furman of the Brookings Institution has been brought on as Obama’s chief economic adviser. In my mind, this is great news. At the Hamilton Project - the Robert Rubin run economic policy shop at Brookings - he managed to break the logjam of Democratic centrist policy suckiness that Gene Sperling exemplified (woo hoo deficit reduction and small bore tax credits!). And although he primarily focused on budget and strict-fiscal issues at Brookings, he is totally on board for ambitious liberal policies like universal health care. This quote seems to capture the evolution from the deficit hawkishness of Robert Rubin to the near consensus on public investment across the Democratic party:
The stabilization of the long-run deficit is inevitable—policymakers have no choice but to abide by the iron laws of arithmetic. But the most important budgetary issues are the choices policymakers make about how much to invest in research, how much to spend ensuring that everyone has health insurance, and what is done to make our nation more secure.
For Furman, and even for the Hamilton Project as a whole, health care is an “economic imperative” that should have priority, along with broad based public investments, poverty reduction and tax reform. Klein also thinks is a good move, saying that Furman is an “extremely bright, and extremely politically skilled, economist.” I also think it was a good move, politically, to bring Furman on board after Obama wrapped up the primary. That’s because of Furman’s Brookings-cred, it can be said that Obama is optically “moving towards the center” (despite the fact that Furman is a hair to the left of Obama’s former economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee).
Also, bringing Furman on earlier would have raised some hackles with the economically nationalist wing of the party. He has a history of left-wing contrarianism about that most sticky of issues: Wal Mart. He debated Barbara Ehrenreich on whether Wal Mart was good or bad for the American working class and poor (he thought it was good because low prices on consumer goods meant more disposable income) and even wrote a paper entitled “Wal Mart: A Progressive Success Story.” For what’s it worth, I think he’s substantively right on this question, but I’m sure some lefties will be critical of Obama for this step. Maybe that’s why Furman is promising to talk with Jamie Galbraith and Alan Blinder, who have more leftie cred than the old guard of Summers and Rubin (who, of course, will also have a voice in the Obama campaign/administration).
All in all, I think this is a good pick. I agree with Furman both on many specific issues, and more generally, on his approach to economic policy. He talks about broadening participation in the economy, so that everyone can reap its gain, as he puts it, “You need to empower people to make the economy work for them.” This approach, I feel, can thread the needle between the essential GOP/Supply Sider/early 90s DLC truth that economic growth best advances all social ends, while acknowledging that unless a broad base of people can participate in said growth, the result will be enmity, inequality and a concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy few.
Furman also repersents the (intellectual) death knell of the deficit reduction uber alles wing of the Democratic policy elite. When Furman is running a policy shop founded by Robert Rubin, and he can be so liberal and talk so much about public investment, you know that the days of Clintonian timidity on the economy are essentially over. But even if we won the intellectual battle, the real question is if we can swing centrist-minded Blue Dogs to support a more ambitious economic policy.
Late in the campaign, when it became painfully obvious that she was headed to defeat, Clinton began to embrace feminism as more than just voting for her. She talked about sexism in the international arena and how women’s rights and autonomy are probably the linchpin for achieving any sort of laudable global goal like reducing disease or eliminating poverty. But it was too little too late. For most the campaign, when Clinton and many of her close supporters and surrogates talked about feminism, it was very inward focused, as Haley Swenson put it (on a super secret blog) “her talk of campaign sexism and “we’ve come a long way, baby” were really the extent of any talk of feminism or revolution she offered. Her feminism was a self-centered feminism.” And I don’t want to minimize the importance of talking about sexism in the media or sexist portrayal’s of women in leadership or political roles, but she never offered a compelling larger narrative for what her candidacy meant outside of simply breaking the last class ceiling.
Obama, on the other hand, was able to put his own historical candidacy in a larger context than simply breaking a barrier for African Americans, but also talking about how he could be a unifying figure for more than just different racial groups, but also ideologically and globally. His race was certainly the basis for his change and history message, but it wasn’t the entirety of it. It also didn’t help that Clinton’s surrogates were so quick to belittle the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy, as opposed to offereing up some sort of counter-narrative. When Bill compared Obama to Jesse Jackson and when Geraldine Ferraro found her inner George Wallace, the historic or transcendent aspect of the candidacy was even further diminished. Add on her Washington experience, her history of triangulation, voting for the War, being more hawkish and an allergy to appearing to being seen as too far to the left, and it was just very hard to make an argument for the larger meaning of her campaign outside of her fufilling the aspirations of mostly older women.
And that’s horribly sad, because even though sexism is not the uniquely American sin that racism towards African Americans is, it’s still a huge, systemic and horrible problem. And if Clinton could have tied her being the first female president to a larger discussion not only about the systemic gender inequalities that afflict American women, but also talk about the horrible inequalities faced by all women and, if she was really daring, talk about a less masculine model of the presidency. But she rarely took her historic message outward, and as Meghan O’Rourke devastatingly notes, she even played up her own masculine traits and even tried to imply that Obama was too weak, wimpy and conciliatory to be president.
This failure to historicize, radicalize or open up her campaign was probably a safe political one - if America demands that their first black presidential candidate to be a “post-racial” rorschach, then they clearly don’t want their first woman to be a reconciliatory, dovish type - but it also means that her campaign won’t be remembered for starting to chip away at the last glass ceiling, but instead as a banal, failed project.
Brock sees a racist rat in the discussions of the sucessful Scandinavian welfare and its vaunted homogeneity:
Whenever I see claims that the Scandinavian welfare state owes its success to its “homogeneous population”, I always hear this in the background:
“America can’t have a successful welfare state because of all those lazy n—–s.”
I’m generally critical of imputing malign motives to ones political opponents, but I read this claim so often, with not a shred of empirical or theoretical evidence to back it up, that I think there really is a bit of racism behind it.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it, and I think when you hear about the Scandinavian work-ethic, one could easily make the argument that this notion is covering up some ugly sentiments. But when it comes to the argument that homogeneity is one reason why Scandinavians are willing to tolerate a high level of income redistribution, it has a fair amount of logical and empirical support. First, it just makes a lot of sense that people are more willing to redistribute income to those that look like them and with whom they have a broad base of cultural and almost tribal similarities with. And, I think, the evidence has generally borne this out. Ed Glaeser and Alberto Alesina have published research showing that racial diversity can undermine support for income redistribution or for the funding of public goods. Glenn Loury, in his seminal article on crime and race, wrote that:
Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996.
It was during this period, of course, when the public largely turned against welfare. Just about every political scientist or observer admits that America’s history of racial conflict, and more fundamentally, of racial diversity makes large scale redistribution more difficult. Sheri Berman, in her history of European social democracy, The Primacy of Politics, makes the argument that some sort of social solidarity, one that can often be nationalistic and even exclusionary is necessary for social democratic politics to work:
A few of the commenters raised questions about my notion that social democracy has an
inherently communitarian nature—and here again I will stand my ground. You may not
like it, it may smack of nationalism or exclusivism, but the fact is that if you want an
order based on social solidarity and the priority of social goods over individual interests,
some basic sense of fellow feeling is required to get that order into place and keep it
politically sustainable. So long as nation-states remain the basic form of political
organization in the world, moreover, such fellow feeling will have to be fostered within
national borders. Social democrats who can’t accept and deal with this will just end up
ceding ground politically to the radical right and various populists, who will step in to
supply the communitarian cravings that publics continue to display.
The necessity of this type of communitarianism, which very much has a “dark side” of nationalism and even fascism, has turned off some liberals from the very idea of redistributionist politics, like Will Wilkinson: “the kind of homogeneity and conformity necessary to generate the sense of solidarity that leads to popular, high levels of redistribution ought to be unattractive to liberals, who are either cosmopolitan pluralists or not really liberals at all.”
So the question becomes for liberals who favor some higher levels of redistribution and a social-economic make-up resembling a social democracy is how can we create the levels of solidarity necessary to convince people to give up a (greater) portion of their income to people who live far away from them and look very different from them.
Many, like David Sirota, have proposed a very fervent economic nationalism, whereby Americans of all colors can be unified around the fact that they’re getting screwed by transnational elites. This approach, as evidence by Sirota’s paucity of ideas that would actually improve the economic situation of anyone in that article, would seem more likely to lead to pointless demagoguing against Dubai Ports or foreign ownership of infrastructure, and more dangerously, easily feeds into Dobbsian rhetoric against immigrants. Even Sirota admits that the Minuntemen are dark cousins of the very populists he lauds. And if it comes to a choice of greater redistribution within the United States, or greater immigration into the United States, I’ll always chose the latter. And while admirable social democracy in Europe may have been built upon solidarity and a certain level of cultural and ethnic homogeneity, it’s not at all obvious that it was built upon the negative solidarity and fundamentally confrontational model of politics that Sirota and his ilk propose.
My proposal may seem idealistic, but I think it’s the best shot we have: simply convince people that social democratic arrangements are better! With the huge run-up in inequality and the health care crisis, we should be able to simply win some arguments on the margin. But it’s also important to stick to the big thing(s): ensuring every American has access to a decent and worthwhile life. The economic nationalist approach, which seems to value confrontational solidarity and nationalism as values in themselves is just too risky and, empirically, hasn’t exactly delivered the goods.
I remember thinking a while back that Obama could entice Clinton to either drop-out or at least tone down her rhetoric by letting her be the pointwoman on health care reform. It seems like a perfect idea: many liberals aren’t too happy with Obama on health care and the issue doesn’t seem to animate him in the same way government transparency or foreign policy does. Clinton, on the other hand, is positively electrified by the subject and clearly is incredibly passionate about it. And, according to the Telegraph, at least, the Obama campaign has floated this idea as a way to get Clinton to bow out gracefully. And it sounds like a great idea! Clinton doesn’t take the campaign to Denver, gets a plum position with lots of power and influence and everyone’s happy. There are, however, a few rather signifigant problems.
1. If Clinton is assigned to run point on health care, GOP talking point number for the entirety of the process would be Hillary Care 2.0. The damage these optics do is that despite the content of the plan, the public will think that her proposal will mean the government taking control of the insurance industry, rationing their treatment and radically changing the nature of their health care. Considering the amount of work universal health care will require to get passed, it doesn’t seem worth it to start so far in the hole.
2. For all of Clinton’s purported political skills, it’s not at all clear if she’s the best person to champion a major piece of legislation. From her record, we see scant achievements. Of course, it’s been hard to pass progressive policy for as long as Clinton has been a senator, but still, she simply hasn’t shown that she can pass anything as big, complicated and controversial as universal health care. Had she been instrumental in something like NCLB, I’d have more confidence. And then, of course, she never played a major role in passing any legislation during her time as first lady. Her health care reform plan was a political nightmere which many attribute to her flaws in trying to shepherd it through Congress, and after that, she played little to no role in passing anything noteworthy. It’s also worth remembering that Democratic senators are supporting Obama pretty solidly. And if Carl Hulse is right, many of Clinton’s senatorial colleagues don’t view her as particularly important - she is, after all, 36th out of 49 democrats. If Obama were to make Clinton his key ally on health care, he could alienate both more senior Democrats who have been pushing health care for a long time (Ron Wyden, perhaps) and those more conservative Democrats (Baucus) whose support will be absolutely crucial.
3. It’s not all clear if Obama and Clinton could work well together, or if they would particularly want to. I don’t want to accuse Clinton of being obsessed with bringing Obama down, but it’s certainly a possibility that she wouldn’t be a total team player in pushing forward health care legislation. Senators are notorious for carving out little fiefdoms and jealously guarding their own influence, even at the expense of presidential or party goals. It would make more sense, it seems, for Obama to go with someone he can well trust like Dick Durbin and then try to bring in another more conservative Democrat like Evan Bayh or Max Baucus.
I don’t think that there was any “fair” result from Michigan. Not only was Obama not on the ballot, but turn out was incredibly low because people were told that the votes wouldn’t actually elect any delegates.
Considering these rather odd circumstances, ther was no good way to apportion the delegates. It can’t really be said that Clinton’s 55% reflected her “true” level of support (lots of people probably just voted for her because she was the only major nominee on the ballot) and Obama’s “true” support was significantly underestimated with his zero percent. So the RBC should have decided Michigan by doing whatever the Clinton campaign wanted. This wouldn’t have actually affected the results - Obama still would have his delegate lead - and we wouldn’t have to be worried about Harold Ickes pronouncing that “We reserve the right to challenge this decision before the Credentials Committee.” At this point, all that matters is getting Clinton and her supporters to see the delegate allocation and Obama’s inevitable victory as legitimate. Although the ultimate Michigan ruling of halving the delegate vote and giving the uncommitted to Obama may be “fair,” when Harold Ickes says that four delegates have been “hijacked” from Clinton, all I can see is Clinton continuing her campaign and continuing to press on Michigan despite the superdelegates moving to Obama after the Puerto Rico primary.
Let’s say that Clinton gets the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. All this changes is that Obama’s lead in pledged delegates is lessened, but he would still have the lead. He would also have the lead in total delegates, because he’s taken the superdelegate lead. The only thing Clinton would get is the “popular vote.” But the popular isn’t an official metric of anything - the total delegate count is. But if Clinton is pushing Florida and Michigan to be seated so that she can tell superdelegates that she’s the popular vote leader, then it doesn’t actually matter if the delegates are seated at all. The popular vote is still a unofficial metric, and so it really makes no difference if the states that give her a popular vote lead are actually seated. Clinton can no longer make a case based on delegates, no matter who gets seated, so if she wants to make the popular vote argument, she should just make it without trying to say that Obama’s election is illegitimate.
Bruce Bartlett points out that despite the Libertarian tendency that has flared up within the conservative movement, the Libertarian Party itself is unlikely to do anything influential:
Although this may turn out to be a banner year for the Libertarian Party, the LP is not a real alternative to the Republicans and Democrats. Because of the Electoral College, restrictions on ballot access and onerous campaign finance laws, third parties simply aren’t viable for actually electing candidates. Nor do they pull the major parties toward their position: Ron Paul’s success did not encourage other Republican presidential candidates to even pay lip service to his ideas.
I believe that libertarian ideas would be better promoted by an interest group such as the National Rifle Association than through the Libertarian Party. Such a group could use the limited resources available for libertarian ideas far more effectively by establishing a political action committee, lobbying and advertising than by a political party running futile campaigns for public office. Nevertheless, the Libertarian Party may be an interesting force this year.
One of the odd results of our two party systems is that a basic idea - libertarianism - can gain so much traction despite having essentially zero politicians who favor the entire ideology. If you believe Brink Lindsey, as I do, America since the late 1960s has become vastly more free both economically and culturally. And yet, actual libertarians have been essentially shut out of our politics. And although I doubt Lindsey’s idea would ever get off the ground - actual ideological libertarians are much too fractious to really organize anything politically - there’s a deep libertarian tendency within much of the media elite that’s incredible influential.
A vast number of powerful media folks espouse a kind of soft, upper crust libertarianism. I’m thinking here of Thomas Friedman, Jonathan Rauch, the Economist editorial staff, Lindsey and Matt Welch to name a few. When I say soft libertarianism, I mean that they are generally social liberals who are also big fans of markets, but not to the point of being Rothbardian fundamentalists. Of course Friedman goes off the reservation with his support for massive investment in green energy, but it’s still impossible to deny that among much of the elite - especially the media elite - this type of soft libertarianism is quite popular. There is, of course, a disconnect between these soft-libs and the movement types who, because of their ideological passion, have largely been able to define the Libertarian movement. But it’s the soft-libs, or market liberals, or classical liberals or whatever you want to call them, that have the most influence and mainstream respect.
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.
Andrew Sullivan links to this IHT article about the border fence. To make it short, it’s pissing a whole lot of people off, but it also appears to be “working”:
The protests come as known efforts at illegal crossings - measured by the number of people detained at the border - have fallen 17 percent this year, after declining 20 percent in 2007, figures that Chief David Aguilar of the Border Patrol points to as proof that the overall approach to border enforcement is working.
Still, Aguilar and other officials acknowledge, the new fencing has mainly proved useful when it has been backed up with other enforcement methods, like electronic surveillance and aggressive prosecution of illegal immigrants caught by the Border Patrol.
Since last year, the steepest drops in illegal crossings along the 2,000-mile border were recorded here in eastern Arizona and in places in Texas where those combined tactics were applied, official figures show.
That’s certainly interesting, but could it be that there are other factors affecting how many people try to cross the border?
In addition to the border enforcement, immigrant traffic is influenced by a variety of social, political and economic factors; the recent drop in known crossings, for example, occurred as the economy began to sputter, drying up construction jobs and others that lure immigrants.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that our sporadic, politically motivated attempts at immigration enforcement are something close to a crime against humanity. The fence, for example, just motivates more, less safe migration. The reason there are so many migrants crossing in the area of Texas that they’re currently building in is because they had already locked down the urban border crossings in San Diego, Nogales, El Paso and other cities. So, people started crossing in the desert, where not only do they have to pay coyotes to smuggle them across, they also face the risk of dehydration and exposure. Also, the immigration crackdowns on the other side of the border by ICE don’t meaningfully deter immigration or generally enforce immigration law, they’re politically motivated to make the Bush administration look like its doing something because they couldn’t pass comprehensive immigration reform. But the people who pay the price for the administration’s attempt to save face are the most marginalized members of society, especially children.
I used to think that no once could top DMX as far as election related nuttiness spouted by a rapper. The convicted felon, so he can’t vote, has admittedly not been following the race, and when asked by XXL magazine what he thinks of Obama, he had this to say:
You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!
Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!
Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?
Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?
Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.
You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.
I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.
Barack, I guess, but I can’t make a real opinion. I ain’t watching no debates. I just want my people to understand that Hillary and Barack are not running for president–they running to be able to run for president. There’s a Republican party, too–we ain’t about to win, fool! A woman or a black man versus an old white dude? Fcuk no! They gonna be like, This black-ass nigga trying to come in my Oval Office? Fcuuuuuk no.The world about to end in 2012 anyway. ‘Cause the Mayans made calendars, and they stop at 2012. I got encyclopedias on the bus. The world is gonna end as we know it. You can see it already. A planet doesn’t exist: There’s no more Pluto. Planes are flying into buildings–and not just the Twin Towers, but dudes who play baseball are flying planes into buildings. Mosquitoes bite you and you die. And a black man and a woman are running for president!
Although Wayne gets points for at least knowing who Barack Obama is, he does better than DMX by talking about the Mayan calendar and citing there being “no more Pluto” as proof that the world is surely coming to an end. And extra pop-culture awareness for citing the tragic Corey Lidle incident. But perhaps Weezy is being extra insightful, four years of a McCain presidency - ending in 2012, could well bring the world to an end.
But to be fair, “there’s no more Pluto” and “mosquitoes bite you and you die” should definitely be new catchphrases for when something really weird is happening. Now only if Tha Carter III could drop…
The basic nut of Obama’s “bitter” remark was that because there’s been economic stagnation for a lot of people and a general lack of responsiveness to their plight from the political system, they’ve turned to symbolic cultural issues to express their political identity. Another implication of this type of reasoning is that much of the racially motivated voting we see in Kentucky and West Virginia - poor, white states - can be explained by a combination of outright racism as well as a feeling of zero-sum competition among poor whites and blacks.
Jim Webb, who’s the closest we have as a national spokesman for working class whites, says that Obama is doing poorly because affirmative action has whipped up resentment:
“We shouldn’t be surprised at the way they are voting right now. This is the result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African-Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white. And these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it. …. The fact that they would line up and vote this way is not so much a comment on Barack. … I think Barack Obama is saying a lot of good things that will appeal to this cultural group in time.”
We get some anecdotal backing of this type of reasoning in this great Al Jazeera piece about Eastern Kentucky, the most depressed and whitest region of the state:
At 2:10, a man just out-right says that he fears an Obama presidency would mean that blacks would someone enact retribution on whites. Sounds pretty bitter to me.
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.
David Frum, in the course of reviewing Todd Gitlin’s The Intellectuals and The Flag, proves that basing any of our political decisions, or even really judging people, on patriotism is misguided:
If it is “true patriotism” to enact universal health insurance, improve pre-K education, or advance other social goals, one has to wonder why we need the concept of patriotism at all - or indeed whether the person advancing these goals attaches any real meaning to this utterly redundant concept. He may invoke the word “patriotism” to soothe acceptance of political goals that have nothing to do with patriotism - as George Lakoff urged Democrats to adapt the language of “freedom” to lull Americans into accepting a very different program of economic egalitarianism. Seems rather Orwellian to me - and also suggests that for the person invoking the word “patriotism” in this way, patriotism itself is rather a redundant concept.
Here’s a third problem. Like Obama in his Philadelphia race speech, Gitlin tries to distinguish between the fearfully flawed United States as it is - and the reformed country into which the United States might evolve. It is the latter, hypothetical, country that deserves patriotic affection. But there is this one problem: that hypothetical country does not as yet exist. This is not patriotism - it is a wish fantasy.
Frum is basically denying the two options available to reform/change oriented liberals to both a) make a scathing critique of America-as-is and b) assure people that they are making this critique because of how badly they want to see America-as-it-should-be. And Frum is right, from a logical standpoint, that calling your standard leftie mix of policy recommendations and deep criticisms of American policies “patriotic” is, if not vaguely Orwellian and totally redundant, a stretching of the term. But if Frum won’t allow us critical lefties to call ourselves “patriots,” then what is left? I’m afraid that the only type of patriotism that remains is that patriotism that is so easy to criticize: namely, the love of country so that it can kill foreigners in wars. Because once you bracket off those critical optimists from describing their policy program or orientation as patriotic, then all that’s left is a left-winger’s worst parody of patriotism: essentially an pointless reverence for symbols of America, combined with full throated support for everything we do in foreign affairs, especially war. If that’s all patriotism can be, then there’s really no point in being a patrior.
Will Wilkinson has some very perceptive things to say about human capital and early-childhood government education interventions:
On the one side are conservatives and libertarians overly attached to genetic explanations of socioeconomic achievement, who therefore see spending on early childhood development as futile. On the other side are liberals overly attached to abstract structural explanations of the reproduction of class, who therefore see a focus on state interventions in early childhood as elitist victim-blaming. I find that I actually side more with the liberal complaint than with the conservative one, though not so much for the reason that it is victim-blaming. Many poor parents are to a large extent to blame for the under-development of their children. There doesn’t seem to be a way around that. But I worry very much about the social control of the poor by elites, which Don mentions. However, I worry about the harms of self-reproducing poverty even more. At this point, I’m not sure where I really stand, though I think I’m tilting in favor of Heckmanesque early childhood programs as part of the liberaltarian package, which also would include wage subsidies and beefed-up unemployment benefits together with a radical deregulation of the labor market and the economy at large.
This is a general policy program - early childhood and governmental intervention to increase human capital and try to stop the intergenerational transmission of poverty combined with deregulation of labor markets - that I totally agree with. The problem is that, politically, those who support the early childhood interventions and those who support the “radical deregulation” are in different parties. And most importantly, with the exception of Reihan Salam and David Brooks, there are few Republicans who really care about those early childhood interventions at all. In fact, the Republican approach to education policy is a schizophrenic mixture of the heavy-handed mandates of NCLB and a Gingrichian desire to localize and balkanize educational policy and administration as much as possible. And so, when Republicans talk about labor market deregulation, or just opening up the economy more generally, there’s absolutely zero committment that they’ll counter those deregulatory moves with helping to improve people’s ability to compete in an open economy. Considering that, it’s better to take the risk of marginally more “scleroticism” with Democrats because at least they have a history of embracing deregulation (Clinton, Carter), while Republicans have no interest in the liberal half of the equation.
