An ongoing review of politics and culture

What Part Of China You From?

I’m trying to understand, per this post by Matt Yglesias, why when China asks us to reduce our indebtedness that reflects “confusion” on their part (since their currency policy depends on there being lots of American debt to purchase) while when we ask China to reduce their trade surplus we’re just being clear and honest (even though we’re dependent on Chinese debt purchases to keep long-term rates as low as they are).

It seems to me both countries are dependent on a policy that has risks and unpleasant side effects for both countries. I happen to think the short-term costs are more serious for the Chinese while the long-term risks are new serious for us – but it’s pretty clear that both countries manifest a high degree of policy confusion, at least with respect to our public statements. I see no reason to single out the Chinese for talking “nonsense.”

One Man's Ceiling Is Another Man's Floor

By the way, I do have one modest proposal for debt ceiling reform.

We’re all agreed that the big driver of future deficits is the growth in Medicare, which in turn is driven primarily by the growth in the cost of medical services (secondarily by demographic factors).

Both parties agree with this, but there is stark disagreement about how to restrain the growth of Medicare: whether by greater government control of the medical system or by less (or by a combination thereof – Obamacare plus the voucherization of Medicare would be such a combination).

We’re also all agreed (everyone who’s actually paying attention, anyway), that the debt ceiling serves no rational purpose. Congress approves both taxes and spending; if Congress refuses to approve borrowing the difference, then Congress isn’t making a policy statement – it’s simply refusing to do its job. Even if the purpose of the debt ceiling is symbolic – forcing the legislature to acknowledge how much borrowing it has caused to be necessary – it fails to achieve this goal effectively, as it mainly serves as a vehicle for political posturing to the effect that its the other party that’s to blame.

So: my modest proposal:

Replace the debt ceiling with a Medicare ceiling.

Right now, spending on Medicare is automatic, the result of a set of formulas enacted by the legislature. But it doesn’t have to work that way. It could be subject to a statutory spending limit. A budget, if you will, that the legislature would have to approve, annually. And if spending was projected to exceed the budget, HHS would have to go back to Congress either to get supplemental spending approved – a revision to the budget; a raise in the ceiling – or changes to the formulas that would bring projected spending down below the ceiling.

Obviously, simply adopting a budget isn’t a solution to the growth of Medicare (though that is the essence of the Ryan Plan’s solution: hand out vouchers and limit the amount of money you spend on the vouchers, counting on the private sector to provide at least some insurance package for the amount of the voucher). But if we’re going to have some kind of symbolic provision to try to drive spending restraint, it makes a whole lot more sense to me to have that limit relate directly to spending – and, more specifically, to the spending that is actually driving the scary projections that you see for mountains of debt in the future.

And there’s at least some precedent for adopting a budget for Medicare, since I believe this is the way it’s done in other countries that have government-provided health care services or insurance.

Alternatives to Neoliberalism

Henry Farrell, as quoted criticizing Matt Yglesias:

To put it more succinctly – even if left-leaning neo-liberals are right to claim that technocratic solutions and market mechanisms can work to relieve disparities etc, it’s hard for me to see how left-leaning neo-liberalism can generate any self-sustaining politics.

Kevin Drum agrees:

If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we’ve ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade.

But Matt Yglesias responds:

So I really, strongly, profoundly agree with this. The moment someone comes up with a workable idea on this front, please sign me up. But if there’s no idea to debate, then there’s no idea to debate. Debating the desirability of devising some hypothetical future good idea seems kind of pointless to me.

But this completely misses the point. Neither of his critics are primarily saying that neoliberal policy ideas are bad. They are saying that neoliberalism is bad politics – not because it can’t win an election, but because it is based on running on good ideas, winning elections, and then implementing those good ideas. And that’s not a self-sustaining politics. From a more traditional left-wing perspective, you don’t start with good ideas – you start with ideas for how to establish enduring power bases.

Broadly speaking, the alternatives to liberalism reject the goal of finding the best policy, meaning the policy that will benefit the most people, in favor of promoting policies that may hurt more people than they help, but that shift the balance of power in favor of the group you’re seeking to represent.

I think what both Matt and his critics are talking about is how to make things better for working-class Americans. If I were starting from that premise – how can I reliably improve conditions for working-class Americans – and I accepted a critique of liberals (neo or not) as naive about policy, I’d say: working-class Americans will be unable to secure a better economic deal until they wield more power. And what strengthens the hand of labor more than anything is tighter labor markets.

Now, Matt might well agree with this, and say that the best way to get to tighter labor markets is to have looser monetary policy. But you can get to tighter labor markets either of two ways: you can increase the number of jobs, or you can restrain the growth of the labor force. Historically, all sorts of legislative initiatives had as at least part of their purpose the goal of restraining the growth of the labor force – child labor laws and mandatory public schooling (no labor competition from underage workers) and immigration restriction (no competition from immigrants from lower-wage countries) are some obvious examples, but Jim Crow laws and pervasive discrimination against women also worked to restrain the growth of the (white male) labor force.

I hope nobody would seriously argue today for driving women out of the workforce as a way of reducing the labor pool and increasing the clout of working-class men (by, among other things, reducing women to a state of abject dependence on said men). But that feminism – which yielded huge benefits for women and substantial net benefits for society as a whole – didn’t involve tradeoffs in the past with other goals. One could certainly argue that the same is true today when it comes to trade or immigration. Liberal policies could authentically be more beneficial for humanity in general – they could even be more beneficial for Americans in general – while also having consequences that are negative for the power of organizations devoted to advancing the economic interests of working-class Americans specifically.

Looking at the other side of the ledger – increasing the number of jobs – may be more ideologically congenial. Matt may be right that the single thing that would most efficiently improve the jobs picture is looser monetary policy. (As I’ve written many times, I think our status as a substantial debtor nation and sponsor of the world’s reserve currency raises questions about whether this is true or not; Japan, by contrast, whose monetary policy Ben Bernanke criticized in his academic work, was a massive foreign creditor all through their “lost decade” of the 1990s.) But viewed from the perspective of power, the question to ask isn’t whether looser monetary policy is a good idea in general but whose interests are served by tighter versus looser monetary policy. Clearly, up to a point (nobody benefits from a depression), tighter monetary policy is in the interests of creditors, just as, up to a point (nobody benefits from an inflationary spiral), looser monetary policy is in the interests of debtors. So the question then becomes: why is the Fed more responsive to creditor interests than to debtor interests, and how could that balance be changed? Allow me to suggest that the communications problem alone involved in making monetary policy as such – rather than the more obvious manifestations of clout by large financial institutions – is a pretty serious one. It may well be that efforts to combat unemployment directly – by employing people – while substantially less-efficient, would both garner more public support and create a base of support for the continuance of such programs (as in: people who don’t want to be laid off). This is the same kind of argument Matt himself makes when it comes to the stimulus bill and fear of “waste” – sometimes there are higher priorities than efficiency.

Playing politics means making choices, setting priorities. Yglesias’s priority for the incoming Obama Administration was a carbon-pricing scheme that (he hoped) would at least slow the progress of climate change. The priority of the Democratic Party was passing health-care legislation establishing, in principle, a right to health care (and, hence, an individual obligation to purchase it – individual rights are just the obverse of individual obligations, after all). That choice didn’t reflect any analysis of which problem – health care or climate change – was more important; it reflected some combination of a calculus about what could be accomplished (the votes were never there for a carbon-pricing law) and a calculus about what would enduringly improve the balance of power between labor and capital (a carbon tax would be vastly easier to repeal than the health care law, for one thing; for another, the health care legislation would give the government an enduring lever to bend American health care in the direction of more economically equal outcomes; for a third, battles over benefits for legacy employees arguably have derailed the American labor movement for a generation; I could go on). Someone to Yglesias’ left might say that EFCA was more important than the health-care bill, and should have been a higher Administration priority.

The broad point is: alternatives to neoliberalism won’t be as liberal. They be less-likely to prioritize efficiency. They will also be less-likely to prioritize positive-sum solutions. They will also be less-likely to prioritize basic fairness or democratic principles or whatever else. They will assign a higher priority to increasing the economic and political power of the people they are trying to represent (or their designated representatives). That’s not Matt’s starting point, and that’s why he comes to different conclusions.

The Missing Girls

If it’s possible for frequent Scene readers to miss a column by Distinguished Scene Alum Ross Douthat, I cannot urge you enough to read today’s column.

It’s on the topic of sex-selective abortion, one which is important to me and on which I have written before. Ross brings new (gruesome) facts to light and, of course, his excellent prose.

Again, please read.

One Small Victory For Representative Democracy

Just a very quick note (I’m on vacation) about this week’s news out of Albany. I’m gratified by the result, which I support. I’m pleased that Senators of both parties were permitted by their leadership to vote their consciences. But I’m particularly pleased that New York will be one of the few states to decide this matter in the proper democratic fashion.

The history so far of same-sex marriage in the United States consists mostly (though not exclusively) of courts ordering legislatures to pass equal marriage rights for same-sex couples, and plebiscites decreeing that no such rights shall be extended. Neither is the way representative democracy is supposed to work, because neither the courts nor the people themselves adequately combine deliberation with accountability.

So I am especially gratified that legislators in my home state were manly enough to do their job and secure for New York’s citizens the equal rights and privileges they concluded the citizenry deserved, rather than punt to the courts or to the people themselves.

I’ll probably have more to say when I return from vacation. But for now, I’m kind of proud to be a New Yorker.

We Do It All The Time

Will Wilkinson wrote a nifty piece linked to this opinionator item from the NY Times about our “true” selves. In the latter, Joshua Knobe presents the following situation:

Mark Pierpont used to be an important figure in the evangelical Christian effort to help “cure” gay people of their homosexual desires. He started out just printing up tracts and handing them out in gay bars, but his ministry grew over time, and eventually he was traveling the world and speaking to crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. There was just one problem. Mark Pierpont himself was gay. He continued to feel sexual desires toward other men and was constantly engaged in an effort to suppress them. In the documentary film “Protagonist,” Pierpont movingly describes his inner conflict, saying that he sometimes felt an almost physical revulsion at his own desires and would then think: “Good. I hate this. I hate sin, just like God hates sin.”

Faced with a case like this one, we might be tempted to . . . tell him that what he really needs to do is just look deep within and be true to himself. . . Yet, though there is a great deal of consensus on the importance of this ideal, there is far less agreement about what it actually tells us to do in any concrete situation. Consider again the case of Mark Pierpont. One person might look at his predicament and say: “Deep down, he has always wanted to be with another man, but he somehow picked up from society the idea that this desire was immoral or forbidden. If he could only escape the shackles of his religious beliefs, he would be able to fully express the person he really is.”

But then another person could look at exactly the same case and arrive at the very opposite conclusion: “Fundamentally, Pierpont is a Christian who is struggling to pursue a Christian life, but these desires he has make it difficult for him to live by his own values. If he ever gives in to them and chooses to sleep with another man, he will be betraying what was is most essential to the person he really is.”

Each of these perspectives seems like a reasonable one, at least worthy of serious consideration. So it seems that we are faced with a difficult philosophical question. How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?

Knobe goes on to argue that the answer to this question is inevitably ideological – people identify the “true” Mark Pierpont with the “side” in the conflict that they agree with. Liberals say he’s “really” gay and should chuck the religious repression. Conservatives say he’s “really” Christian and shouldn’t give in to temptation.

But those are the perspectives of outsiders. What do they know? I would wager anything that, from Mark Pierpont’s perspective, the “real” him is the one in conflict. That’s what makes his situation tragic. The desires don’t come from the devil and the repression doesn’t come from society. They both come from him.

And this is not a peculiarity to homosexuality. The woman who is a devoted mother who’s fallen out of love with her husband has a conflict. You could say that she “needs” to take care of her needs and leave him, or she’ll wind up dragging her kids down with her misery, or you could say that she “needs” to put her selfish needs aside and think of her children, and that if she does this she’ll find fulfillment within the life she has. But these aren’t advice – they are ways of making us feel better about the advice we’re giving. The reality is: she’s got a profound conflict. Her true self is divided.

My own hard-won wisdom on this matter is that, whatever way you wind up jumping in these sorts of conflicts, you first have to acknowledge that the conflict is real. It’s really easy to tell ourselves happy little lies to convince ourselves that the conflict doesn’t actually exist, but we’re not really fooling ourselves. We’re getting through the day, but at a cost of escalating levels of stress and alienation from ourselves. And, as a consequence, from those who care about us.

And I find that, once you acknowledge, openly, the conflict that exists, you’re generally most of the way toward the resolution that, in retrospect, is obviously right. When the woman tells her husband about her conflict, he’ll have to respond. That response, in turn, will help clarify for her what is and isn’t possible.

Wilkinson, meanwhile, sees all this “self” business in functional terms:

My own view is that the sense of a stable self is an evolutionary construction with a certain social function, which our intuitions about authenticity reflect. The primary human means of survival is social cooperation. But cooperation is fragile. We need to trust one another to follow through, to not take advantage. Coordinating on a common moral ideology facilitates cooperation, but only if we all stick to it. We cannot make others trust that we will stick to it if we cannot trust ourselves not to opportunistically change our stripes. So we build a sense of self upon the shared moral ideology of our local culture. We come to feel that to betray these values would be to betray the essential self. To prize integrity is to fear disintegration. To violate our constitutive values is to risk falling apart. This fear of falling apart—of losing one’s self, of standing for nothing—prods us to keep our oaths, to pull our weight, and thus to be truly trustworthy, even when it would be to our advantage, in some sense, to cheat. So the sense of self enables social cooperation. But what matters most is not so much the content of our moral ideology, but simply that we all stay pretty much the same over time, so that we can continue to trust ourselves and one another. This is not to say that the values upon which we build stable, cooperation-enabling senses of self can be anything at all. But anything that works works, and probably there are many moral ideologies that work reasonably well.

Well, okay, I’m down with the idea that one reason we don’t feel good about radically changing our personae is that we’ve evolved a desire to maintain others’ trust in us, which entails maintaining a consistent persona that can be trusted in. But what’s the evolution purpose of the self itself? That is to say, if we experience an internal conflict, such as Mark Pierpont’s, why, unless there is a reality to the self, can we not resolve that conflict by an act of will? Why are we so constituted that we can experience that kind of conflicted self, a self that needs two things that cannot be reconciled? I don’t see how you answer that question without accepting that the self has some reality. When you say “anything that works works” that means, presumably, anything that works for your real self. Because, given that you have a real self, not everything will.

Finally, both Wilkinson and Knobe spend much of their time thinking about how we perceive other people’s “true selves.” But it’s important to recognize that their examples pertain to situations where we are not experiencing these other selves directly, but rather mediated through mass communications. If we knew Mark Pierpont through his various changes, we would make an assessment of whether he seemed “more himself” before or after not only based on our ideology but based on our actual experience of him. If we are at all sensitive people, we’d know – whether we liked it or not – whether he seemed more “real” before or after.

That’s not an option we have with political and media figures, and it’s worth highlighting how our intuitions can serve us poorly when we experience people in a mediated form. I will argue – confidently – that Mitt Romney is an authentic person, someone with a strong sense of self. One piece of evidence for this is that he is an exceptionally poor panderer – he comes off as completely phony. And, since he panders all the time, this makes him seem – in a political context – completely inauthentic. Which he is. He is an exceptionally phony politician. But not because he panders more than most politicians – because he panders much less successfully than most politicians. He is, to invert a famous formulation, an exceptionally poor liar. Exceptionally poor.

That fact has real political consequences. A President Romney, precisely because of this lousy political persona, would not be trusted by any pressure group, and hence would be much more constrained by said groups. I’d compare him to another politician who was distinctly lousy at conveying political authenticity: George H.W. Bush. But this has essentially nothing to do with his “true self,” of which the elder Bush I have no doubt had a pretty darn robust sense.

My point is: when we talk about politics, the intuitions that we bring to the game from the world of small-scale interpersonal relations can easily betray us. The guy who “seems authentic” and “makes you want to trust him” is the guy to be nervous about – because he has a kind of charisma that is powerful. He is not earning your trust; almost by definition, he’s conning you. That doesn’t mean “don’t vote for that guy” – precisely because that guy has that power, he’s likely to be more effective. It means don’t trust that this “authenticity” means what it might mean in an interpersonal context of long and stable relationships. You don’t really know who any of these guys are. The one thing you can know for certain, though, is that they aren’t who they want you to believe they are. Because they want you to believe that they understand you, personally, and they want tens of millions of other people to believe the same thing about them. And that’s just not humanly possible.

Putting the GM Bailout in Context: A Defense of Jim Manzi

Since we’re talking about it, I wanted to clarify my own views about the GM bailout.

I don’t believe this Administration, the prior one, or any likely future Administration thinks it’s a good idea for the government to be in the auto business. Higher education, maybe. Health care, perhaps. Mass transit, potentially. But I don’t know anyone making the case for socializing the auto industry.

I also don’t believe either this Administration, or the previous one, did anything resembling a serious cost-benefit analysis to arrive at the conclusion that te government should bail out GM. I think there’s value in that kind of analysis, but I don’t believe it can be done effectively on the fly – and anyway, I think it was very clear that all parties knew the political realities going in, and knew what result they wanted from any analysis.

The government simply was not going to let GM go bankrupt after bailing out the banks. Period. This was a political decision. That kind of decision happens all the time, and I don’t feel like very much is implicated by it philosophically. Each party doubtlessly has its debating points to make about how costly the bailout was (or how much less costly than expected) but they are just that: debating points. There is no great push to socialize American manufacturing generally, nor do I feel that anti-GM-bailout sentiment now will have any material bearing on whether the government acts similarly in the future under similar circumstances – such as an incipient global near-depression. In that sense, I really don’t see that GM “matters” all that much.

What matters a whole lot more than GM is learning something from the last decade’s financial debacle, as it was this debacle that both finally drove GM into bankruptcy and created the political climate in which a GM bailout was necessary. In that regard, it’s worth pointing out that Jim is far from a caricature of a right-wing ideologue. Rather, the lesson he takes from the crisis is that we need to restore something like Glass-Stegall: something that prevents banks that take insured deposits from taking certain kinds of risks. I’m skeptical that the G-S framework would actually achieve this, but I agree with the goal – but more to the point, this is a call, from a conservative, for fairly stringent and heavy-handed (albeit relatively uncomplicated) regulation of a major sector of the economy.

By way of putting GM in another context, how does the GM bailout compare, in terms of sheer dollars wasted on a venture undertaken with very little attempt to calculate an expected return, to the war in Iraq? In this regard as well, it’s worth pointing out that Jim has been consistently critical of the extremely forward nature of America’s defense posture. He’s not Ron Paul or Daniel Larison, but he is very far from a typical movement conservative on this score as well.

Finally, on many areas where Jim does line up on the “right” side of the debate, his perspective doesn’t always lead where you might think. For example, Jim has written a great deal about climate change, an about the difficulties with using the tax code to try to do anything meaningful about what he acknowledged could be a very serious problem. In my back-and-forth with him, it emerged that Jim agreed that a gas tax hike would be a more-optimal revenue-raiser from his perspective than a hike in income tax rates, or a carbon tax, or a VAT, or almost any other new tax. It might still be less-optimal from his perspective than, say, cutting the mortgage interest deduction or privatizing Medicare. But that conclusion – better than most other ta hikes! – is still a pretty significant one, and, if he were a legislator, the potential basis for fruitful negotiation.

Those are much more consequential debates than any debate about GM. However sympathetic or not I may be to Jim’s epistemic humility project, I defy regular readers of this blog to look at what Jim has written on these topics and conclude that his philosophical premises lead inexorably to predictable partisan conclusions.

A Post About 2012

Had John McCain been chosen as Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996, he would have been substantially better positioned to compete for the nomination in 2000. He might well have won, and had he done so he would have won the subsequent general election more decisively than Bush did.

Similarly, had John McCain lost with Tim Pawlenty as his running mate in 2008 (and he would have), Pawlenty would have had at least as good a shot as Mitt Romney of taking the nomination this time around, his uninspiring persona notwithstanding.

As things stand, Tim Pawlenty seems like he would make a perfectly adequate running mate for Mitt Romney to lose with to Barack Obama. Which would give Pawlenty at least an outside chance of being competitive in 2016 against Rick Perry and Jeb Bush.

A Peace Without Peace?

Speaking of Israel, David Samuels has actually met with more of the key players on all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than anyone I know, so it behooves anyone with an interest in same, and in the latest Administration moves (and Israeli and Palestinian responses thereto) to check out his latest on the subject.

To refresh everyone’s memory: as of 1988, when Jordan ended all territorial claims to the West Bank, Israel faced a difficult strategic problem: the only way to get out of ruling millions of Palestinians, and thereby becoming a bi-national state, was to negotiate with the Palestinians directly, rather than with Jordan. As Israelis generally understood, there was a natural asymmetry between the two parties that would work to the Palestinians’ advantage in negotiations. Specifically, the Israelis needed an agreement. Establishing some national entity other than Israel as the home of the Palestinians was the key Israeli objective, and that could not be achieved without Palestinian assent. But the Palestinians didn’t need an agreement. A one-state “solution” was a perfectly viable alternative – indeed, in many ways a preferable one to partition, from a Palestinian perspective.

But, if you think about it, why did Israel need an agreement? Once Israel withdrew from the Palestinian population centers, and allowed them to establish a government, wouldn’t that foreclose the otherwise inevitable end in bi-nationalism? Even if a de-facto Palestinian state refused to recognize Israel – even if it were still at war with Israel – wouldn’t the mere existence of such a state change the character of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, from one of “how do we share the territory between the river and the sea” to “how do we settle our border disputes/water use disputes/outstanding refugee claims/etc” – the kinds of disputes that are common between states.

Oslo was, arguably, the first phase of unilateralism, because even though there was an agreement and a handshake, what was agreed to was not peace or anything resembling peace. All that was agreed was a willingness to keep negotiating – the Palestinians conceded nothing fundamental. Except the most important thing: they conceded to the creation of an entity with whom Israel could negotiate, with territory under its control and a government of sorts. They agreed, in other words, to create the nucleus of a Palestinian sovereignty that was distinct from Israel.

Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza was the next phase in the Israeli strategic retreat, more obviously unilateral in character. Leaving Gaza meant letting Hamas take over. Letting Hamas take over meant certain security risks – but it also meant creating the fact that Gaza had its own political destiny. It might reunite with the West Bank; it might not. But that fact that was established was that Gaza would decide which it would be. That’s another fact of sovereignty, and whether Israelis understood it or not it was the main thing they got out of the Gaza withdrawal.

I confidently believed at the time that, had Sharon not had a stroke, he planned to continue with a similar withdrawal from the West Bank, a withdrawal that would mean abandoning many settlements (though none of the large ones), leaving the Palestinians in the West Bank with a substantial contiguous territory. Israel would, in essence, have hung on to everything it wanted to achieve through negotiations – much more than they would actually be able to get at the table. The Palestinians would get their de-facto state: precisely the state that Israelis wanted them to get.

Whether such an outcome would have been just or not isn’t really the question I’m addressing; my point is that Israeli policy has been, since Oslo, aimed at creating a de facto Palestinian state to end Palestinian statelessness, which is the biggest threat to the legitimacy of the State of Israel, on terms that concede as little as possible in terms of Israel’s own territorial objectives. Peace has been a secondary goal at best – the goal has been to achieve a strategic retreat on the most favorable possible terms.

(Obviously not every Israeli has been pursuing these goals – there are genuine idealists on both the left and right, on the left aiming for something like a comprehensive peace, on the right aiming for something like an apartheid state. But I would argue that the broad center of the Israeli political spectrum has always been pursuing something like what I describe above.)

Returning to Samuels’s piece: what he argues, basically, is that Obama has left the door open for Israel to pursue something very like this objective, if Netanyahu has the sense to see it. The next phase of the so-called “peace process” would involve the following, according to President Obama:

Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met. I’m aware that these steps alone will not resolve the conflict, because two wrenching and emotional issues will remain: the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees. But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair and that respects the rights and aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians.

The Palestinians are not going to agree to permanent borders without settling Jerusalem or the refugee question – and neither are Israelis. So this “agreement” on the “territorial outlines” of Palestine just means another unilateral Israeli withdrawal, this time from the various settlements that nobody expects to be incorporated into Israel in the context of an agreement. The Palestinians would be agreeing merely to allow Israel to leave – and thereby achieve another Israeli diplomatic objective: the creation of a contiguous Palestinian entity in the West Bank, further entrenching the reality of the division of the land between two sovereignties, one Jewish, one Palestinian Arab.

All of that sounds very persuasive, and I have little doubt that Ariel Sharon would understand it – and act on it. But Netanyahu? I doubt it.

The most serious obstacle to achieving the above has a name, as it happens. And the name of that obstacle is Hebron. Hebron is an overwhelmingly Arab city in the heart of Judea. It’s also home to a substantial Jewish settlement, probably the most intensely ideological settlement in the entire West Bank. It’s also one of Judaism’s holiest cities, burial place of Abraham and his family – and is holy to Muslims for the same reason. If Israel does not withdraw from Hebron, then Israel will have to maintain a substantial military presence in the heart of any Palestinian entity – the occupation will not end and be transformed into a border dispute. But to withdraw from Hebron would be to declare, in a very literal sense, that nothing is sacred.

Which would be a good thing, in my humble opinion. But I can’t see Netanyahu doing it.

What Are Friends For?

FIRST LORD: Might we but have that happiness, my lord, that you would once use our hearts, whereby we might express some part of our zeals, we should think ourselves for ever perfect.

TIMON: O, no doubt, my good friends, but the gods themselves have provided that I shall have much help from you: how had you been my friends else? why have you that charitable title from thousands, did not you chiefly belong to my heart? I have told more of you to myself than you can with modesty speak in your own behalf; and thus far I confirm you. O you gods, think I, what need we have any friends, if we should ne’er have need of ‘em? they were the most needless creatures living, should we ne’er have use for ‘em, and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases that keep their sounds to themselves. Why, I have often wished myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits: and what better or properer can we can our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort ‘tis, to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another’s fortunes! O joy, e’en made away ere ‘t can be born! Mine eyes cannot hold out water, methinks: to forget their faults, I drink to you.

Timon of Athens, by William Shakespeare

Maybe it’s just because I’m working on a screen adaptation of the play, but it seems to me that Timon’s psychology is highly relevant to understanding our receptivity to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertion that “America has no better friend than Israel,” which Matt Yglesias found so absurd.

Timon is an enormously wealthy Athenian who has spent his adult life dispensing benefits – giving extravagant gifts to everyone he knows, from his servants to his fellow lords. He is, consequently, everybody’s best friend. The arc of the play has him eventually give everything away, leaving him destitute, at which point he – with considerable relief – turns to his friends and beneficiaries for help, and discovers that nobody loves you when you’re down and out.

I’m not interested in drawing an analogy between America’s financial situation and Timon’s (not at this point), but rather between America’s psychological situation and Timon’s at the beginning of the play, when Timon still thinks he is wealthy. Timon has a desperate need to be loved. Not loved by a particular someone – he has no wife, no children – but loved generally. He showers the world with gifts as a way of buying that love, but he knows, deep down, that because he is the giver he is, in terms of love, in the inferior position. If he were the one in need, and others helped him, then he’d know, like George Bailey at the end of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” that he really was the richest man in town. And so he is semi-consciously spending himself into that position of dependency.

On some level, Timon cannot accept the idea of friendship on the basis of mutual and equal recognition – or, rather, he longs for this, but cannot imagine how it would work in practice. He gives, and acquires flatterers and dependents, because he wishes he could be a dependent, be cared for – but so long as he is wealthy, he cannot accept reciprocal return of kindness, but must always make sure that the other fellow is in his debt. There is something scary about the idea of being independent equals. He would rather live out vicariously the experience of being dependent and cared for through his beneficiaries than have a genuinely equal relationship.

The United States’ relationship with the world – for whatever reason – is similarly fraught. We have, from the earliest days of our nationhood, had a problem with the idea of mutual and equal relationships among states. Many, many nations on earth consider themselves to be exceptional in some way or other – the English, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, all have national myths about possessing a unique spirit that destined them for greatness or dominion. Even smaller nations often have flattering national myths – the Poles and Serbs have a myth of national martyrdom for (respectively) Catholic and Orthodox Christianity; the Swiss have a myth of national superiority to the barbarous foreigners around them; the Jews . . . well, that national myth is probably well-known enough not to need repeating.

But America’s national myth is distinct, I would argue, in that we swing wildly between an idealistic self-conception as entirely separate from the rest of the (fallen) world and an alternate idealistic self-conception that is globally imperialistic – in both conceptions, America is not merely better than the rest or the natural leader of the rest, but somehow is the world, unto itself. Our nation lacks a clear mental conception of its own boundaries. And such a conception is necessary for mutual relations on the basis of equal respect.

How does this play into our relationship with Israel? Israel is useful to America psychologically because it allows us to live vicariously through her, and thereby experience the tender care that we long for ourselves. Being universal is an extraordinary burden for any person or any nation. It is, among other things, a terribly lonely condition. America is not actually alone, but we experience our national existence as lonely precisely because we deny ourselves the experience of fellowship, as that would imply definitive boundaries between ourselves and more or less equal others. Israel experiences an isolation of a different kind, but when we show our friendship for her, the psychic benefit for us is that experience of feeling as if we received that friendship, as if someone else broke through our national loneliness. And that’s a considerable psychic reward.

Yglesias says in his piece that Israel does nothing for America – Israel is a burden, nothing more. This isn’t entirely true – Israel has, for example, proved a useful partner in intelligence-gathering in the past, helped battlefield-test American weapons back when we weren’t fighting so many wars ourselves, and was a useful proxy for undertaking certain unsavory tasks. But against this must be set Israel’s repeated violations of basic rules of friendship – spying on us, re-selling sensitive technology to our rivals without permission, etc. And that’s before you get into the question of whether Israel is a geopolitical asset or a significant liability.

But Israel has been a particular friend to America in one respect. When we want to assert our exceptionalism, Israel has consistently supported that assertion. Much of the rest of the world wants to subject American power to something resembling a system of laws and norms through institutions like the International Criminal Court. America, for understandable reasons, has resisted this, even when parts of the system were our own creations, designed to legitimate our own supremacy by limiting its absolute scope. We can debate whether our resistance is wise or not, but my point is that Israel has been consistently supportive of our resistance – again for obvious reasons. The psychological component of this comraderie is that we are simultaneously able to maintain our sense of ourselves as boundless and universal, and relieved of some of the burden of our solitude in such a position.

Obviously there’s more to the US-Israel friendship than the psychological dynamic I’ve outlined above. But I do think it’s a vital component of that relationship, a component that talk about the potency of the Israel Lobby on the one hand, or of America’s natural affinity for a fellow democracy on the other hand, doesn’t really capture.

By most objective measures, Israel is not our “best” friend. Myself, I’d bestow that title on the same country Yglesias does: Canada, whose friendship we take almost entirely for granted. But Israel is a unique kind of friend for America, a friend that provides us psychic benefits that we really cannot get from any other country. Asking America’s relationship with Israel to become “normal” is really another way of asking us to reevaluate why we want those psychic benefits, and whether we wouldn’t really be better off without them.

The Generally Sensible Parisian reaction to DSK

The DSK drama has pretty much replaced the weather as the default topic of conversation in Paris this week. It’s very easy to find self-parodic essays in various French journals that try to justify DSK’s alleged crimes, or turn this into an indictment of American “frontier justice.” But among the people I know here, the reaction to the whole event has been completely recognizable. While the tone and weight of various strands of reaction vary from person to person, in general, people have reacted with a mix of shock, disgust and introspection.

These are obviously informal impressions collected from a small, extremely non-random sample of people who might be censoring their real views when speaking with me. My only point is that contrary to how it might seem just from reading media analysis, the French and American public reactions to this event seem vastly more alike than different.

There are some differences between how the legal process is handled in America and how it would be handled in France.

The biggest complaint about the process thus far is the objection to the “perp walk” of a man accused of, but not yet tried for, a crime. There are sensible arguments on both sides of this question. On one hand, the freedom of the press to report, and principle that all accused, regardless of social station, should be treated alike are important values. On the other hand, this practice is rife with the potential for abuse, as the state can use it to try to influence the potential jury pool, and has done so in the past. Neither argument is seen as without merit on either side of the Atlantic, but the balance between these competing goods is struck differently in each place.

Second, while it is illegal in France for the media to show pictures of the accused in restraint prior to the trial for the reasons just indicated, major media outlets here have named the rape accuser. Laws around this were struck down in the U.S. starting in the 1970s / 80s, but major American media outlets will generally not do it before or during a trial.

Third, how sex crimes are defined, and the severity of the punishment, is not identical between the two countries. However, this difference in attitudes toward sex, marriage and the workplace can easily be exaggerated. I don’t advise you to explain to your French spouse that you have commenced an affair with your co-worker because “il est normal.” You’re very likely to find yourself and your clothes on the sidewalk, while getting an impromptu lesson on the creative use of the French language delivered form a third-floor balcony. And before people start building grand theories about what the sex lives of French politicians say about French society, they ought to figure out what the sex lives of Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer, the “hiking the Appalachian Trail” guy and so on (and on and on) say about American society in general. I suspect what they really say is that narcissistic personalities in any society are disproportionately drawn to, and enabled by, careers that provide fame and power.

I’d say that a summary of French take on the differences between how this has been handled in America and how it would have been handled in France, is that (1) American justice is viewed as somewhat rougher than it should be toward the accused, but this is combined with (2) a simultaneous admiration that an immigrant chambermaid can trigger the machinery of the state to bring action against an extremely powerful, well-connected person without it being hushed up. Both sides of this contain elements of truth, and play to pre-existing stereotypes, so therefore get lots of traction with public opinion.

But the similarities in attitude are dominant. The differences in what can be shown or who can be named in the media are not some kind of ancient common law differences. The French legal prohibition on pictures of the accused in restraint is only about ten years old, and the non-binding practice of not naming rape accusers in the U.S. has also only evolved in recent decades. There are good faith arguments on both sides of these questions, and both are variations on a theme of trying to provide due process that is fair to all sides. I could easily imagine the French prohibition migrating to the U.S., and the U.S. prohibition migrating to France (or new media breaking down this practice in the U.S.). And for all the talk of French “aristocratic” attitudes or whatever, most people here hate the idea of the powerful abusing privileges – and specifically of a powerful man trying to rape a hotel chambermaid – and like seeing arrogant, privileged people being brought down a peg. As in America, most people recognize that so far we’ve only heard one side of the story, and that the guy should be fairly tried in court rather than in the media; but that if he did what is alleged, he deserves to go to prison.

(Cross-posted to The Corner)

Raise High the Roofbeam, Legislators

You know, I’d never thought about it before, but it’s obvious upon reflection that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional.

Think about it. Congress’s most fundamental jobs are to tax and to spend – the “power of the purse.” If Congress passes a budget under which revenues are insufficient to cover expenditures, the Executive has three options, theoretically:

- Borrow the difference. – Raise taxes without Congressional authorization. – Cut spending without Congressional authorization.

Either of the latter two encroach on a core legislative function. If Congress also prohibited the first option (by refusing to raise the debt ceiling) it would be impossible for the Executive to perform it’s responsibilities.

The debt ceiling is theatre, a way of forcing Congress to acknowledge the consequences of its own budgets. If the Treasury were simply to ignore the debt ceiling and borrow what was required under the operative budget, Congress would scream, but really it would get what it wants: a free pass to disclaim responsibility for its own budgetary decisions.

What was that again about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others?

In Search of a Theory of Three Party Systems

As I understand it, party competition in mature democracies is supposed to converge around two major parties, one on the center-right and one on the center-left. The reason is quite straightforwardly strategic: if either party strays too far from the center, it gives the other party the opportunity to seize the center and with it a majority; and, if either party splits or faced serious competition for votes from a new upstart party, vote splitting would doom both parties on whichever side of the ledger they happen to be on to perpetual minority status.

Obviously, you can have periods where there are multiple parties competing to become one of the two stable alternatives, but these should be relatively short transitional periods, not the normal course of affairs. And obviously as well this analysis works better for some democratic systems than for others. It makes more sense for American and British-style systems than for proportional-representation systems, for example. And it works better when you don’t have a regional or sectarian or other identity-driven party throwing a wrench into the works. But it’s a sufficiently thoroughgoing assumption that whenever a political system doesn’t conform to this assumption, it’s treated as an interesting exception.

But the exceptions are starting to devour the rule.

Canada just had an election whose results might be described as “what was supposed to happen in Britain’s last election.” That is to say: the third party came in second, the NDP substantially overtaking the Liberals for the first time in history. If the assumption that two-party competition is “natural” is to hold, the Liberals should fold, leaving two major parties (Conservatives and NDP) competing for Canadian votes. But for reasons of history if nothing else, this is unlikely to happen any time soon.

But apart from history, it’s worth pointing out that if the standard assumption of two-party normalcy were true, then the NDP would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Ditto for the Liberal Democrats in Britain, who have been affecting the outcome of British elections for over a generation. Further afield, France, in spite of having a Presidential system, has nothing resembling two-party competition. Israel has a proportional representation system, so it’s a different case, but for a long time it was functionally a two-party system, with a right-wing bloc of parties competing with a left-wing bloc for the majority of voters, and with identity-driven parties for the ultra-Orthodox and the Arab vote that were open to any coalition (in the case of the ultra-Orthodox) or systematically excluded (in the case of the Arab parties). But not anymore. For over a decade, Israel’s political system has been rocked by the emergence of centrist parties aiming to be alternatives to the right and left. These parties have never won an election, but they haven’t gone away, and neither have Likud (even when it shrunk to a tiny rump after the first Netanyahu government) nor Labor (the former center-left powerhouse now dwindled to near-irrelevance and sitting in a right-wing coalition). Should I go on and talk about Mexico? Belgium? Switzerland?

What’s the current political science take on this? Why are third parties much more durable, under a variety of political systems (though not the American), than theory would suggest?

Got Him. Now What?

(I don’t need to link to anything, right? We all know what I’m talking about?)

For some time now, it’s been clear that the two most-likely places Osama bin Laden could be hiding are (a) somewhere in Pakistan; or (b) in the ground. Bin Laden had kidney disease, and needed access to modern medical facilities to survive for a lengthy period. Since he couldn’t just fly in for dialysis and then fly back to his cave, that meant he had to be hiding somewhere that such facilities were readily available. We already knew that he had fled to Pakistan immediately after the battle at Tora Bora, and Pakistan provided a better-connected network of al-Qaeda-sympathizers than probably any other country. So the odds were, if he wasn’t already dead, that he was in Pakistan.

And that’s where he turned out to be. Not only in Pakistan, but in a walled compound a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s military academy.

That location strongly suggests that the Pakistani military, and certainly Pakistani intelligence, knew where he was. Their behavior makes a great deal of sense. There was real political risk to simply handing bin Laden over to America given the level of emotional support for al Qaeda and the level of distrust for and even hatred of America within Pakistan. But bin Laden was himself a threat to the Pakistani state; they certainly wanted him neutralized. And America paid Pakistan a great deal of money to look for him. So keeping him where they could keep tabs on him, and keeping that fact a secret, was the most logical thing for the ISI to do.

Of course, that’s not proof, and neither I nor anyone else I’ve heard speculating has ever been to Abbottabad. But I have a hard time imagining that you could build a walled compound right near the Pakistani military academy without anyone in the ISI asking “I wonder who lives there?”

What does that mean about our relationship with Pakistan? Unfortunately, not much. Our own intelligence officials have suspected for years that at a minimum elements within the Pakistani “deep state” knew OBL’s whereabouts. We used both carrots and sticks to try to get the official Pakistani leadership to take action. The main carrot was lots of money and fancy new weapons; sticks included the escalating presence of American soldiers, CIA officers, and drones conducting operations within Pakistani territory. But none of this appears to have been sufficient. It strikes me as entirely appropriate that the United States, at least in this Administration, prioritized getting OBL higher than keeping Pakistan happy, but not so high that we were willing to risk an open break with Pakistan. Now that OBL has been killed, the balance ironically tips even further in Pakistan’s favor. Even though elements within Pakistan may have been playing a double game with us, our other interests in Pakistan apart from getting OBL haven’t changed. That’s just the way the cookie bounces.

We should be enormously proud of our intelligence services for tracking OBL down, and of the individuals who carried out this daring operation – and, as well, of the Obama Administration for setting the priorities that made the operation possible, and for successfully keeping it a secret until it was accomplished. Eliminating Osama bin Laden was an absolutely essential goal of our foreign policy; alive and at large, he remained an enduring symbol of defiance, the man who attacked the American capital and lived to tell the tale. Not anymore.

But the larger foreign policy dilemmas that we face in Central Asia haven’t really changed. Even al Qaeda itself (assuming one wants to treat it as a unitary organization for analytical purposes in the first place) won’t cease to exist by any means simply because its titular head and one-time financier is out of the picture. One can hope that, this essential mission having been accomplished, we can now have a serious conversation about what our other objectives are in the region, and what the costs and risks are of trying to achieve them.

As an aside: why was OBL “buried at sea” (i.e., tossed overboard)? Presumably so that there would be no grave for unsavory types to turn into a shrine. Conspiracy theories alleging that the whole operation was a hoax would proliferate under any scenario that didn’t involve OBL alive and in manacles, and even then some people would say he was an impostor (as some did with Saddam Hussein for a while). So, once we were satisfied that we got him, OBL’s body was just a burden.