Glenn Greenwald and justified extremism.

I’ve written before about how sensible rhetoric can sound extreme under extreme conditions, and the necessity of making such arguments anyway. This may come as totally redundant to many of my readers, but I tend to forget that there is hardly a better example of this than Glenn Greenwald’s writing for Slate. About issues regarding which we should accept no compromise, Greenwald has been positively uncompromising, week after week, year after year, with wit and poise and total devotion. In the past week, he has highlighted an unusual New York Times editorial hammering President Obama for taking ownership of some of the Bush administration’s practices on executive secrecy, detainee rights, wiretapping and other issues. He has also gone after the Washington Post’s editorial staff (headed by Fred Hiatt, whose respect among people I trust declines by the week) for defending its support of a never-ending global counterinsurgency campaign to secure foreign populations while thinking of health security at home as a luxury. This, among reams of other essential writing.

In times that feel increasingly normal and balanced, Greenwald forces us to remember the perversity, hypocrisy, and harm that we tolerate simply because the arc of the moral universe tends to bend in the right direction.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Practicing Politics , greenwald, justified extremism

Heckling to win

I’m sure by now countless parallels have been drawn between Joe Wilson’s outburst, Democrats’ heckling of George Bush, and the institutionalized heckling of British politics in the Commons and elsewhere.

Both the cause of progressivism and American democracy as a whole would benefit from moving toward a Westminster-style political system. But the defense of Wilson’s outburst on the grounds that we should be more like the Brits is, I think, misguided. Obviously, it would be splitting hairs to suggest that Wilson’s outburst was out of line while maintaining that booing the President during the State of Union or hissing during the Prime Minister’s question time are fair game. I agree Newsweek’s John Barry that, on the whole, heckling can be a productive democratic activity. And I share Dana Goldstein’s sentiment that “more frequent, rowdier confrontations between the president and Congress…gives each party a chance to clarify its agenda while subjecting it to the critiques of the other.”

Much like protests and rallies, heckling by the general public pays dividends in visibility and solidarity. Heckling public figures can be a way to air out grievances while demonstrating that support for the speaker is weaker than the presence of a respectful audience might otherwise suggest. The louder the heckling, the less support s/he seems to command. For audiences that aren’t hand-picked and pre-screened, getting booed off the stage can be a powerful symbol.

Not all that hisses heckles. As the Guardian pointed out a few years ago, heckling is in a lot of ways qualitatively different from outright rudeness.

Anger has its place in political discourse, of course…But heckling is something else. At its best, it is almost a conspiracy between the heckler and the heckled, born out of mutual antagonism but mitigated by combative wit; a gamble, too, since neither player can be sure that he—it is usually a testosterone-charged he—will come off best.

Anger—constructive, impassioned, but angry political debate—deserves a greater role in American politics. All too often legitimate grievances get dismissed because they’re proffered by angry people using “angry,” “fiery,” or “shrill” rhetoric. Suffering is political, and it’s often enraging too.

For legislatures, however, heckling is plain and simple political theater. Subject the President to a weekly question-and-answer session with members of congress. That would give each party a means to draw contrasts and battle lines in ways that heckling can’t. As for heckling, I’m all for it. But Wilson’s outburst was just childish, wasn’t wit, wasn’t legitimate or accurate, and it wasn’t a boon for democracy.

—Brian

Filed under: Domestic, Practicing Politics, Symbolism

When moderation is extreme.

I don’t read Paul Krugman regularly, either his blog or his columns, but I do check in occasionally. I don’t read him regularly because I, like many who are inclined to centrism or moderation, can find him shrill, extreme, reflexively partisan. I keep checking in because I respect three things about him: first, we shouldn’t forget that he is a once-in-a-generation economist; second, he very consciously grasps his own shrill extremism and wrestles with it; third, he’s right—a lot.

In the post cited above he comes to the following conclusion: by the time the colored threat level scheme came around and Krugman denounced it as a political ploy, in the absence of hard data it was nevertheless rational to distrust the Bush administration, who had already established a very poor reputation for trustworthiness. This seems right, and is worth noting to any of us centrists who are generally inclined to accept the government’s benevolence in matters where sensitive information is involved. But Krugman is correct on this point: the Bush administration, by its own extremism, inverted the normal presumption of political discourse and created a world in which the moderates were taking an extreme and irrational position; people like Krugman, and Glenn Greenwald, and Russ Feingold, and Ron Suskind, and even, maybe, Dennis Kucinich were the sanest among us.

We should all hope ardently that the world doesn’t require this type of adjustment of us again in our lifetimes, but we should remember to recognize the possibility: there are political situations so extreme that extreme dissent is the correct stance. If the Bush administration is one example, of course there are others that persist constantly (some would pick drastic inequality, global hunger, genocide; others have other causes). The key to being an astute practitioner of politics is to move smoothly and accurately along this scale, from the presumptive position of moderation to strident dissent when necessary, to be articulate in both positions, ashamed of neither, and principled always. Can you?

a.j.m.

Filed under: Practicing Politics , hysteria, Krugman

Principles of health care reform.

Jonathan Cohn, in the New Republic yesterday, writes another excellent article that succeeds in conveying what a weird amalgam the current health insurance proposal is. The guiding principles of the current debate are these: (a) reform should be as bipartisan as possible, (b) it should push as much insurance as possible through employers (the “you can keep the plan you’ve got” clause), and (c) it should be revenue-neutral. The difficulty, of course, is that both of these principles make for worse policy—fewer insured, less choice, higher costs, worse care.

Because we are trying to claw our way gradually up a continuum to a sustainable solution (single-payer health care, for example), we end up with this bizarre and universally suboptimal middle-ground. Take the case of the exchanges, which I’ve written about before. The current plan will establish a marketplace through which individuals could purchase insurance from both public and private providers; the exchanges are regulated, exclusion because of pre-existing condition is prohibited, subsidies are provided to low-income families entering the exchange, and so on. The trouble is that the current plan would prohibit any individual who currently receives coverage from their employer to enter the exchange. This makes employers unhappy because small businesses will have to provide costly health insurance; it gives consumers worse care because they’re prohibited from entering an efficient market that drives down costs if they so desire. And even if the exchange does attract a significant number of uninsured Americans, they may not have the benefit of a competitive public option now, or this public option will be made worse off.

The long and short of it is, the principles that Obama has put in place to guide the debate make for worse policy, no matter how much maneuvering is done within those guidelines. The guidelines, not just political opposition, prohibit reasonable options from rising tot he surface. Notice that there is a perfectly simple middle-ground between a single-payer plan and the current proposal: allow any American to enter the exchange or keep their current option as they please. Those who don’t want a public health care plan because they’re worried Obama is going to come into their homes and put a pillow over their children—just don’t switch. It would be difficult for those who do leave their employers’ plan, join the exchange, and opt for the public option to argue that they are being coerced simply because the government can offer better care. You will have ever liberals’ heartfelt condolences for being enticed into health. This is not even what many experts feel is the optimal solution, a single-payer plan; this is a simple adjustment to the current compromise that would provide better coverage.

So here is the point: more and more it seems like health care is not an issue that this polity can cope with adequately. There is too much vitriol, too much opposition, too much fascination with democratic procedure to accomplish anything worthwhile. The Democrats botched this thing from a start: you can’t fight hyperbolic fire with an ongoing negotiation. Health care reform is one of those things that should be negotiated by technocratic, bipartisan experts, behind closed doors, with access to every shred of information and data available to the American populace, and then voted on by congress, yes or no, in one fell swoop. Health insurance is not a point for compromise and posturing: health insurance is one of the basic duties of a civilized populace, and one the United States currently does not live up to. Health insurance should be expensive for its government, unabashedly successful, so capable it becomes transparent, and this accomplished by any reasonable political means necessary. Our government do what it takes to ensure that none of us have to think about health care again—because it is one of that scant handful of things a government must do for its people.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Domestic, Health, Practicing Politics , single-payer

A Theory of Change

Today, as we steer a new course at the United Nations, our guiding principles are clear: We value the U.N. as a vehicle for advancing U.S. policies and priorities, and universal values…We work for change from within rather than criticizing from the sidelines. We stand firm in defense of America’s interests and values, but we don’t dissent just to be contrary. We listen to states great and small. We build coalitions. We meet our responsibilities. We pay our bills. We push for real reform. And we remember that in an interconnected world, what’s good for others is often good for America as well.

—UN Ambassador Susan Rice, speaking today at NYU.

Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy, International Organization, Liberalism, Practicing Politics, Who We Are, the next order

Symbolism matters

I’m working two posts on the role of prestige and status considerations in international affairs. (Big topic, I know. It’s not like I have a new job or anything.)

Symbolic gestures have received little play from political scientists. Meanwhile, practitioners—diplomats, bureaucrats, and political appointees—understand the significance of symbolism and how to deploy it to win political victories, but this understanding operates at the tactical level. Policy-types have good intuitions about flattery, symbolic gestures, and the significance of words as well as deeds. We know it’s good diplomacy to deploy high-profile envoys in order to exact concessions from seemingly egotistic regimes. We’re less clear on 1) how prestige influences decisions and 2) how prestige motivations can be used to advance U.S. interests, particularly when actions taken by states in pursuit of prestige run up against U.S. interests. In other words, we’re missing some understanding of prestige and political symbolism at the strategic level. The next two posts will attempt just that.

Prestige and status are fundamental to the international system, but so far we can only deal with it on a day-to-day level. This is, in some ways, a uniquely American problem. We ignore how other countries seem themselves relative to us and others to our own disadvantage.

—Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy, Practicing Politics , prestige

Stay classy, America.

David Callahan, from Demos, has a provocative piece in this month’s Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The gist is that while Americans are behaving more ‘morally’ on a range of issues—abortion, drunk driving, teen pregnancy, &c.—we have experienced a harrowing rise in more germane forms of immorality like fraud, conflicts of interest, bribery, and overbilling. Callahan wants to argue that this is the result of the spiraling compensation for executives, lawyers, doctors, and the like. (Add to Callahan’s evidence this revolting graph from The Economist this week.) The solution is to restrain compensation packages, and to establish a White House Office of Ethics, Integrity, and Character that will educate the public through various schemes. Good luck there. (The acronym sucks {and it’s an absurd idea—Whip Inflation Now!}.)

I don’t have a sexy solution for the waning honesty in our society—I expect the best we can do is to appeal to civic virtue, combined with reinvigorated organs for punishing bad behavior, and, yes, a renewed commitment to countercyclical economic policy and popping speculative bubbles. I do not think increasing an executive’s salary by 10%, or $100 million, makes him x more likely to commit fraud. The problem is only partially economic; it is also basically ethical.

I did like this, though. Callahan says waning honesty should be thought of as a values issue.

When pollsters for Harris Interactive asked Americans in January 2008, “What do you mean when you say that moral values are very important to you?”–an open-ended question–28 percent mentioned “honesty,” 11 percent said “integrity,” 9 percent said “family values/belief in family,” 8 percent said “ethical/has character/has good values,” and 8 percent said “someone who does the right thing/stands for what’s right.” In a 2005 poll by the Democracy Corps, even Catholics said that issues like abortion weren’t the moral issues that concerned them most. When respondents to this poll were asked to define moral values in open-ended responses, issues of integrity led the list (24 percent), followed by family and culture (22 percent), and the golden rule/social compact (21 percent).

Filed under: Practicing Politics , countercycle, ethics, fraud, morality, values

Putting U.S. intelligence back on track.

One of the popular academic opinions about the sources of poor intelligence estimation is that the likelihood an estimate will be publicized or released to congress will skew the judgment of the analyst. Glenn Hastedt has been particularly forceful in developing this hypothesis, which is surely a valid concern. So with this in mind, as well as the fact that the House is set to debate a new bill on intelligence oversight tomorrow, we should recall how brave Panetta’s action was today to inform the congressional intelligence committees that the CIA mislead them on unspecified matters possibly dating back to 2001. Much has rightfully been made of this administration’s hypocrisy in claiming to be advocates of transparency and falling short on those promises; but my point is that Panetta today struck a major blow for transparency in a situation in which he could have easily done nothing and pandered to his organization. Panetta—surely with the approval of the President—went well out of his way to do absolutely the right thing in a way that might well make his job more difficult. The intelligence-policy relationship is an extraordinarily delicate balance in which half-measures and half-truths are often employed to maintain the balance; Panetta today took a rare broad stroke, presumably to rectify a broad concealment. Congress needs to do their part to recognize that Panetta’s action was probably supererogatory given the expectations of Washington, but an obligation fully met by the standards of the American people; they should laud the effort, and refrain from crowing over the admissions. Today was a major, and much-needed step toward repairing the damaged expectations that have governed the intelligence-policy relationship following the Bush years.

Update: I’d been writing ‘today,’ but Panetta was informed of the program on June 23, cancelled it and informed Congress on June 24, and Congress’ letter was sent on June 26. Clearance issues prevented the news from becoming public until now. We should all hope that Sy Hersh’s rumors that the program was a Cheney-run assassination squad are unfounded; that is not a happy prospect. It seems to be something of comparable magnitude, though.

Filed under: Practicing Politics , intelligence, oversight, panetta

Something amiss in the imperial state.

…has decided to pursue the United States Senate seat…

The decision came after a series of deeply personal and political conversations… whom friends describe as unflashy but determined, wrestled with whether to give up what has been a lifetime of avoiding the spotlight.

…will ask Gov. David A. Paterson of New York to consider her for the appointment…

…has been making calls this morning to alert political figures to her interest.

…decision is likely to have a major impact on the governor’s considerations

I can’t believe I’m the only one that finds these phrases slightly creepy. The reporter is doing backflips to conform to journalistic standards and accurately represent the situation. The whole thing has the sense of a fait accompli from a personalistic dynasty. It feels weirdly Indian or sub-Saharan African or Napoleonic, but hardly the mark of a developed democracy. I guess what I’m trying to say is—who the hell are you, lady?

 

Let’s state it plainly: this kind of primitive personalism does not suit this country’s egalitarian meritocracy. It feels odd; it feels weird; it feels dumb. Time to be done with the Bushes, Clintons, and Kennedies and build ourselves some American leadership that meets with our times. (This doesn’t count).

The question, though, gets to a broader deficit of depth in Democratic ranks. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton came essentially out of no-where; Kristen Gillibrand, Patterson hopeful, likewise. There were many in Washington who were disappointed by Clinton’s nomination to State—but couldn’t think of a name they liked better. Thankfully, the Obama administration will train a new wave of insiders and wonks, but this election season has pointed to deeper deficit of public visionaries in Democratic ranks. 

—a.j. mount

Filed under: Domestic, Practicing Politics , dynasties

Those in the right.

David Frum is right about a lot of things in his appearance on Rachel Maddow’s new show, but foremost among them is this: if we want a better politics for this country, we must build it ourselves; claiming to want a more adult, more substantive politics and then forsaking that promise is the least honorable of possibilities. Maddow replies that ‘American’s absorb information in different ways’—that satire and teasing are no less legitimate than more ‘adult’ forms of discourse. But Americans also receive information through demagoguery, hysteria, and Sunday morning cartoons—and sometimes correct information; the fact is, the form in which the content is delivered often does not encourage Americans to take the content as a solemn and sacred affair. We shouldn’t think of politics as entertainment and permit teasing, or as religion and permit preaching. 

That I think Olbermann and Maddow are fairer and more tolerant than Bill O’Reilly is immaterial: in our current condition, our style almost says more about our characters than our substance. If our primary responsibility is rebuilding our political discourse after the Bush years, then we should not look kindly on anyone those who would mortgage the tone of their discourse to make even a valuable point.

Case in point: Frum is also right, by the way, that liberals in this country to think differently about the threats we face. It is totally disheartening to see a liberal make light of an offer to debate these differences in good faith. We need to raise the level of political discourse in this country.

While I’m at it, by the way, if we excoriate John McCain for permitting hatred on the right, it is important that we praise him for taking steps to rectify this. Even if morally and civically required, taking a public stand against bigotry and fear at his own rally and being boo’d for it is an act of bravery and must be praised. The conventional wisdom suggests that McCain has to let some of this sentiment out in order to win the election, but I think Kristol is right on this point: if McCain digs in, ostracizes those who would have us threaten and feel hatred for our political leaders, he will find himself in far better shape electorally.

Filed under: Practicing Politics , hysteria, McCain