A Swift Blow to the Head: Alex Goodall's Blog

Prime Minister Cameron: Thank Europe

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Wed, 12 May 2010 08:40:00 +0000

As the new Prime Minister David Cameron begins his long task of attempting to construct what is essentially a European-style Christian Democrat coalition, it’s worth pausing and noting one of the paradoxes at the heart of this deal he’s done. The major party that has over the years been the most instinctively, most viscerally hostile to the European project has been fully infected by the bug. The party that more or less completely split in two over European policy in the 1990s owes its new majority in Parliament to a series of key factors, all of which had Europe at their heart.

One: Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts

To quote virtually every one of them who’s done a press conference in the past few days, the Greek crisis has focused the minds of politicians on the need for “strong, stable government.” If the marches and violence on the streets of Athens, and perhaps even more importantly the huge bailout agreed by the Germans and the IMF to prop it up, had not happened, then it’s reasonable to assume that the liberals would have been more willing to accept a “confidence and supply” arrangement whereby they stood further away from the Tories and rejected a formal coalition deal. Their calculation would have been to wait for the Tory government to implode, and establish a Lib-Lab pact after another election with a proportional representation deal at the heart of it.

Instead, Clegg decided that the overriding need was to produce a government that could actually deliver something on the economy, one that would not collapse and produce another election in eight weeks. Part of this calculation was down a genuine sense of nation interest; part was the a sense of the interest of his party. The Liberals will lose voters to the Labour party for the deal they’ve just done, but just think how they would have performed in an election in eighteen months, in an even worse economic context, with a revivified Labour party under a new leader, with the IMF dictating terms to the government, when they could plausibly be blamed for making it impossible for government to take any action to stem the blood flow from the economy?

Two: Let’s Have a Meeting, Ya?

The public seems to be frustrated with the past few days, which they characterise as the “old” politics of backroom dealing in once smoke-filled, now air-conditioned, rooms. As a result, support for voting reform in the model of proportional representation is running roughly at the same rate as opposition to hung parliaments.

This, of course, is a classic case of cognitive dissonance: the dealing we’ve seen in the past few days is the inevitable result of PR, even though we haven't had a PR system deliver it – it’s exactly the “new” politics in action. There’s a good case to be made that it’s the Europeanization of British politics, especially the dilution of the strength of the old Tory right, that has made such a deal possible. With past coalitions in British history, class always got in the way. It’s the technocratic culture of the EU that accepts the need for working together, negotiations and pragmatism; that’s willing to abandon ideology in exchange for a deal.

Three: The Bureaucrat Rides Again

Of course, most visibly, there’s the Clegg factor. Cameron, a man who sits astride a party that has as much contempt for the Brussels bureaucrat as any in Europe, has just made one of them his deputy. Clegg spent five years doing exactly these kinds of deals when he was an MEP, between 1999 and 2004. There’s little doubt that if a more traditional Lib-Dem leader had been in charge, no such deal would have been struck; and Clegg has done an amazing job to pull his party behind him when their instincts and activist support are so solidly pointing away from the Tories.

Of course, it’s not all positives for Cameron. One result of this insidious European influence is that he’s found himself negotiating with someone who’s far more adept and experienced at bartering and haggling than he is. Only time will tell how much of it was planned, but it seems that the master negotiator here was the former MEP. Clegg was always intending to do the deal he’s done, and he knew what he wanted to get from it. Nevertheless, he waited his opposition out long enough to secure Brown’s resignation, which then raised the possibility of a Lib-Lab pact sufficiently to force the Tories into immediately agreeing to a referendum on the Alternative Vote system. No Liberal could have extracted more; and, I tentatively suggest, few without the experience in Europe that Clegg has amassed would have been able to secure even this.

So, in this sense, perhaps the Tories are right to beware the threat of Europe. It looks like they’ve turned out to be living in the middle of it with even knowing about it.

Would you rather be in the Post Office?

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 02 May 2010 12:48:00 +0000

I was struck, while reading the London Review of Books, by a remark in an article by Benjamin Kunkel which perhaps deserves some attention:

“Everyone talks, with good reason, about the runaway costs of healthcare in the US, but if healthcare inflation since 1980 has exceeded 400 per cent, the price of a university education has risen, on a recent calculation, by an incredible 827 per cent.”

In a sense, this should not be surprising. In the developed world we spend less and less of our resources proportionately on basic consumption – food, shelter and the like – and more and more on non-essential goods. Non-essential goods serve two basic functions: one, to make the experience of life more pleasurable; and two, to differentiate us from other human beings by allowing us to ascend within systems of social stratification. Of course, this idea makes most sense when we think about the benefits of joy and status that come from careening through town in a sporty new Jaguar, but this fact is certainly not only true for what Thorstein Veblen famously called “conspicuous consumption”. In fact, far more common is the type of inconspicuous consumption that, precisely because it is not drawn attention to, powerfully shapes the structures of our society. Being healthy and being educated are both prime examples of this.

(I appreciate that some people might be surprised to think of health care in terms of “non-essential goods”. Surely staying alive is absolutely essential? Well, yes, but this isn’t a particularly helpful way of thinking about much of the total amount of health care spending, which is actually focused on improving the quality of life as well as its absolute duration. Hence the growing enthusiasm in health care circles for the “Qualy,” the “quality adjusted life year,” as a unit of measurement.)

Both health care and education provide fundamental ways of stratifying our society. Healthy people and educated people have capabilities and opportunities that the sick and the ill-educated do not. And this is not even just a product of the “real” advantages that these resources provide. Unhealthy people don’t just suffer from the incapacity that comes from not being able to, say, climb stairs, they also suffer from social stigma. The same is also true for education, which so much of the time is actually about socialisation as well as the provision of technical knowledge: that is, it is about teaching people how to operate in social circles which would otherwise ignore or exclude them as well as telling them how to be a banker or a civil servant.

Because these quality of life resources are so vital to the way we order ourselves, the demand for them is essentially inexhaustible. Unless you’re a follower of Sarah Palin, it makes no sense to speak of being “too educated”, since there are always skills and forms of knowledge that would allow you to improve your relative position in society. We may see particular types of knowledge fall out of fashion all the time, but even if the precise content changes the absolute benefit of “knowing stuff” is here to stay. Similarly, you can never be “too healthy.” (Spending too much time worrying about your health is a different matter, not least because it might turn out to be bad for your health!)

And in a market of ever-growing demand and only limited supply, it should hardly be surprising that costs will naturally climb. You can’t solve the problem: if Britain had been able to meet its 1997 target of getting 50 per cent of students to universities, which it didn’t, there would still be an urge to get to 60 per cent. Moreover – and we have seen this happen – students from privileged backgrounds or seeking further advantage would simply look to obtain an additional degree precisely to separate themselves from the now-educated pack, essentially levering their existing assets (a good first degree, financial prudence or wealthy parents) to extend an advantage over others that had been whittled away by broadening access.

We shouldn’t perhaps be surprised, then, that the questions attached to health care and education often focus on controlling costs. The weird thing is that this should surely translate into a great deal for academics and doctors. Purveyors of a precious resource, the cost of which consistently is rising: surely these people are likely to experience consistent improvements in wages, social status and privileges? And yet if you spend any time at all in either circle you’ll find a consistent barrage of complaints about conditions: wages, working hours, staff-student ratios, loss of status. I’d hazard a guess that the proportion of academics or doctors who’d say that their industries are a better place to work in now than in the past are outnumbered by Cassandras to a factor of at least ten to one.

Why can this be? One answer, of course, is that things have been getting better, and these people simply like to complain. For the necessity of preserving good relations with my peers, and of avoiding the taint of hypocrisy, I shall have to limit my comments about this argument. Certainly in the UK, the relative wages of academics and medics have risen in the past thirteen years in comparison to a consistent decline in the period before that, although there’s certainly no chance of a return to the days of yore, when academics were in the same orbit as lawyers or the like - and no-one is expecting anything but the reverse to happen over the next generation.

But are there other reasons why a set of macro factors suggesting there should be improvement might have ironically produced declining conditions for participants?

One argument focuses on wastage, broadly defined. Alongside the general inefficiency of any operation, this can come through the proliferation of non-core activities within the university or hospital, diverting resources away from core functions. As the Conservatives have argued in this election campaign, the growth of state spending may provide opportunities for profligacy which the relentless pressure of profits and losses in the private sector would weed out. So, while growing demand is indeed producing growing payments, not all of this feeds through to the rather militantly-named “front line,” instead being diverted away from the intended beneficiaries by parasitical operations. (The Department for Children, School and Families, Cameron tells us, has a massage suite and contemplation room; though the truth of this seemingly ridiculous decision may be somewhat more complex. See comments here, marked at at 3.51pm).

To draw an analogy, it’s often said that the high levels of corruption in countries and states with a prevalence for natural disasters may be linked to their geological and meterological misfortunes. This is because instead of having consistent and stable sources of income, inward investment tends to be non-existent for long periods, accustoming people to poor conditions, then arrive in a great tidal wave (no pun intended) following the disaster. Certainly, there are cases I can think of off the top of my head of this applying to the history of Louisiana and Nicaragua in the twentieth century. And certainly, there is a strong case for saying that state funding would do better to be set at a stable, median level than to be constantly surging forth and cutting back, as it has done in this country for the past three decades. So the massive growth in spending on health and education in the past generation has not always produced expected results, and some of it may very well have been skimmed off by intermediaries.

It’s true that spending on non-“front line” activities has grown as a share of total spending in both universities and hospitals. The problem is that it’s hard to tell exactly how much of this is really and truly waste, since a lot of it tends to be ostensibly bound up with servicing the front line, especially as the processes involved in education and health care have grown so much more complicated in recent years. Common sense would seem to suggest that the astonishing growth in the salaries and staffing of the vice chancellors’ offices and NHS managers would in large part count as unnecessary, but I’ve yet to see any knock-out blows on this point, and often in practice the absence of effective management can be hugely damaging to the good functioning of an institution.

Another source of waste comes through the twenty year experiment with league tables and other forms of public assessment. One tranche of this waste comes through the proliferation of quangos or other bodies – many of which are populated by full-time academics or medics, and therefore cost the equivalent of diverting their salary for the time they spend on them. The other tranche comes from the pressure to output material of poor quality to satisfy quantitative rather than qualitative forms of assessment in academia; or to jerry-rig the figures in the hospitals to make waiting lists appear artificially shorter than they are. All the half-finished or poorly-thought through material that gets sent out to the presses simply to fill up CVs can be seen as a waste of resources that could be better put into producing fewer outputs of better quality, or simply teaching; although none of these perhaps are quite as offensive to the imagination as the stories we hear of people whose chronic conditions are ignored in order that doctors can quickly charge through easy patients and thus have a more swift impact on overall lists.

Unfortunately, the problem here is similar to the previous one about waste. There’s no doubt that introducing assessment and sharing knowledge about universities and hospitals has brought great benefits as well as inconveniences, producing better programmes of teaching for the students and fewer free-riding members of staff in universities; and highlighting failing hospitals and precipitating changes of management in NHS trusts. So the question will always be about how to balance the relative costs and benefits of such assessment regimes, to adjust them so they work more effectively and don’t incentivise people to behave irrationally.

In fact, when it comes to the question of why so many practitioners feel things are getting worse, more important here are the intangible factors related to the growth in regulation than the direct results of poor incentivization. As government spending has risen so the government has demanded an ever-greater say on how that money is spent. More money going into universities and hospitals has produced more conditionality. In the worst case, one can’t help but think here about Jon Stewart’s remarks on the Texas Board of Education’s decision to ban teaching about Oscar Romero on the grounds that nobody had heard of him: oversight can rather defeat the point of idea of education in the first place, since people who don’t know are the ones who are deciding what they need to know. Much of what academics and doctors complain about when they say things are worse, then, are not poorer conditions per se, but a loss of autonomy. Nothing is more demoralizing to the spirit than to take up a job because you want to be involved in making important, independent decisions about human beings' lives, and to wake up one day and discover that you’ve been turned into a bureaucrat.

But as powerful as this explanation is, it still doesn’t explain why staff-student ratios in universities today are so much higher than they were fifty years ago; or why pressures on doctors are so much more intense. Here, I fear, the answer lies in the maths. To just use the university sector to illustrate, the overall growth of spending on education has operated at a net level, not individually. As a result, the changing total spend has also altered the distribution patterns of spending, so that the money goes to pay for many more academics to teach many, many more students. In the past, the elites were happy to spend X pounds teaching Y students with Z lecturers. Now we spend five times the money teaching ten times the number of students, with seven times as many lecturers. (These numbers are made up, by the way: they're just to illustrate the point.)

In one sense, this makes being a lecturer a much poorer job than it was in the past, when you could sit around quaffing sherry with your two students you were teaching that year and get away with sleeping the rest of the time. (I don't know exactly what the analogy is here for doctors, but I'm sure there's an equivalent!) But seeing it in these terms only reveals part of the picture, because it ignores all the current academics who would not have been academics at all under the old model - when only a fraction of the total number would have been employed in the sector. The same can be said for the students, who are arguably getting a worse average quality of education now than in the past, but are far more likely to have access to higher education at all than they would have fifty years ago.

The average quality of the job has declined, but the total number of people being supported as academics has risen enormously. The spending on education continues to grow, and the public continues to value these things. Modern life is not all about X Factor and Jade Goody. So: the next time your academic or doctor friend moans about how much better things were in the good old days, remind them that back then they would probably have been working in the Post Office.

Personality politics and moral panics

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:58:00 +0000

Both sides of the Atlantic are currently watching first rate examples of the power of modern personality politics. In the States, the Democrats are finally realising that it helps to have an enemy they can point to, and have decided that a couple of derivatives traders at Goldman Sachs will nicely fit the bill. Meanwhile, in the UK, a Rochdale granny has been propelled to the front of the election campaign after Brown was overhead saying she was a “bigoted woman” on a microphone that was still running. This event has capped off an election campaign that has been quite astonishingly volatile, and certainly makes great TV.

The dramatisation of issues of public concern by focusing on individuals obviously meets some deep human need. Society always seems to have some kind of pecking order in which particular people are prominently emulated or hated. And it rarely takes a genius to decode the subtexts lying behind the choice of idols or foes: the Yuppies of the 1980s held up to exemplify the money-grabbing aspirations of the new conservative classes; the bearded revolutionaries of the sixties hung on the walls of teenagers to express their fury at their parents for not letting them out on a school night. But right now we’re in the middle of a hostility that is yet to locate itself on a single target: instead, pretty much anyone is open to a scatter gun of blame. Since the recession began and the popular mood shifted to one of blanket, indiscriminating fury, we’ve seen pot-shots taken at any sinners found lurking among the elite – whether they’re overpaid BBC presenters with big mouths, MPs fiddling their expenses, bankers on the take, or even historians’ caught secretly promoting their books on Amazon – people who, it seems, have apparently failed to fulfil the responsibilities of custodianship that come with the privileges society has accorded them - all treated with fairly equal disdain, despite the fact that the sins involved were of astonishingly different orders of magnitude. These targets capture a real and deep sense that something is genuinely unfair in the way ordinary people are treated in modern Britain, but also an undifferentiated sense that equates Jonathan Ross being rude with systematic legalised theft by the financial industry.

Gillian Duffy is a particularly powerful case because her treatment at the hands of the Prime Minister (if you can call it that) acts as a cipher for many different storylines developing in this election: first in showing up the disingenuousness of the political classes as a whole, who will lobby for the public vote on the basis of “understanding” and “values” then reveal in private that it’s all about calculations and stage management; second, reconfirming the widely circulated idea that Gordon Brown is not a “no nonsense” kind of man but actually quite mean-spirited and nursing a gargantuan persecution complex; third, in showing the profound disregard for working class concerns, expressed here in terms of immigrants but really as much about jobs and benefits and vanishing opportunities for social mobility (as shown by the full script of Duffy’s conversation); and fourth, in dramatising how far New Labour has gone toward deserting its core voters, the “labour for life” people who – precisely because they can be counted on – have been largely ignored in the quest to win over floating voters over the past two decades.

As car crash television, there’s something incredibly compelling about it; and as political metaphor it even has a certain poetry in capturing so perfectly the state of the sinking Labour ship. To me, it resonates with the argument that the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson made in the 1970s in a famous article called “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” later adopted by James Scott in reference to peasant resistance in Asia (and by others in Latin America and elsewhere). Thompson was talking about patterns of bread riots among poor Englishmen and women, and arguing against the simplistic view that riots simply are a product of hunger. Hunger was, of course, a precondition for a bread riot. But, he argued, economic questions operated within complex moral frameworks that moderated and transformed the meaning of particular economic practices.

In short (and far less articulately than the original essay put it), this means that people tend to be willing to accept certain basic inequalities in society over the allocation of power and resources because they have internalised a framework of written and unwritten norms and mores that structure how they see the world. Certain kinds of exploitation are normalised as legitimate and certain ones are considered illegitimate. However, when exploitation passes over invisible lines of accepted moral conduct, the result is an explosive response that, often in a violent and highly ritualised way, seeks both to dramatise and to punish the unacceptable behaviour. This is why a local boss of a village community could lord it over the peasantry for years and collect withering taxes without response, then suddenly without notice find himself strung up or have his house burnt down.

This argument was chiefly important because it sought to suggest there was a complex inner logic to riots. The traditional language of “mobs” used by elites to describe such behaviour was precisely intended to suggest their irrationality, in the hope of rendering such protests incomprehensible. After all, if they’re irrational, what can you do about it except respond with violent repression? Thompson, by contrast, wanted to say that the rioting “made sense”.

So while elites may happily go around exploiting the poor without any kind of reaction, at some point they step beyond an invisible line and an enormous backlash occurs. Today’s situation is in some ways similar in the way in which moral and economic issues are intertwining with each other. The economic crisis has sensitised people to misbehaviour, and people then want to see the problems we’re facing in ethical terms. (Of course, we all know that moral misconduct has been central to this crisis. We wouldn’t be in trouble if bankers weren’t greedy. But that’s not enough to explain what happened: after all, it’s not as if bankers were behaving ethically when we were prospering!) Instead of trying to understand how this crisis has happened in terms of large systems, we look for individuals to blame.

I don’t have a problem with identifying particularly obnoxious individuals and, if they’ve broken the rules, punishing them. There's nothing wrong with a bit of street theatre, either, as long as no-one's hurt. And holding egregious sinners up to the light may well serve a useful purpose of inculcating socially responsible attitudes more widely. Certainly, they help to legitimise the effort to pass new rules to regulate things like bonuses that incentivise people to behave in a socially dangerous way.

But I do have two problems with this persistent personalisation of politics, which make me quite uneasy about these kind of "Duffy moments".

First: the simple fact is that none of the story of poor granny Duffy’s mistreatment would exist without the provocation of the media. Yes, Brown said something mean. But at a fundamental level the media created the issue. Without its efforts to stir the pot, there would have been no wrong done at all, since Duffy wouldn’t have even been upset by the stupid remark said out of earshot. This story, then, is not just about a tired and defeated politician expressing his fury at the world and forgetting to turn his mike off. It’s also about how one group within the elite class is willing to cynically upset the life of an average lady, to camp outside her house and turn her life upside down, in order to benefit its own vested interests. As if those interviewers who almost physically dragged Duffy to their news vans to play her the tapes, and who wouldn’t let her leave until she’d finished her interviews for them, have any more respect for her than the PM did! Frankly, I imagine they have a lot less...

If you watch the interviews on the BBC website you’ll see a wonderful moment where someone phones Duffy up and she answers the call, and one of the Sky presenters makes some sort of incredibly smug and obnoxious remark: essentially that he's astonished that she was more interested in speaking on the phone than doing an interview for Sky. To me, that reaction revealed as much about the contempt the media has for the public as the ostensible story does about the contempt politicians have. But since we’re being fed this whole thing by the media in the first place, it's hardly surprisingly that the first half of this doesn’t seem to get quite the same kind of coverage. If only we were in Germany ... I’m sure they must have a word for the hypocrisy attendant upon feigned outrage over behaviour which one is equally guilty of. The self-righteousness of the media is once again so manifestly disproportionate to many of their members' ethics, that you’re left wondering what, if any of this, is real beyond Mrs. Duffy herself. (For a fantastic discussion on this issue, by the way, check out the recent Freakanomics podcast on ‘Faking It’, especially on Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. You can find it on the New York Times, I think.)

Secondly, while personality politics like this can act distil or reveal a broader set of tensions, capturing an unarticulated mood in a single moment, it can also empty out the policy content of a debate and turn everything into a beauty contest. And that’s pretty much what we’ve ended up with in this election: Cameron suffering for appearing to be too slick, Brown trying to shape himself into brand of not being able to shape a brand, and Clegg presenting himself as an anti-politician: surely one of the most misleading claims of all. Big clue on this one: anti-politicians don’t normally tend to spend their entire lives working in politics.

The simple fact, worth bearing in mind ahead of tonight’s debate, is that we are facing some of the most difficult financial challenges in recent history, and – in no small part because of the media-driven obsession with character and rhetoric and image over content – not one of the parties has seriously begun to fess up about how far in hock we are or how much we'll need to do to start balancing our budgets. The Institute of Fiscal Studies report released earlier this week showed that none of the parties have accounted for more than 25 percent of the cuts we’ll need to make over the next parliament, that all of them are massively overestimating how much can be saved by cuts in spending in comparison to tax rises, that getting debt below 40 percent of GDP might take till 2030, and that many departments are going to be looking at 20 to 25 percent cuts over the election cycle, especially defence, higher education, transport and housing – the biggest budgets that haven’t been given guarantees of protection. This is a real social crisis level. As the Ghostbusters once said, fire and brimstone, earthquakes, volcanoes, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together...

The danger, something we’ve witnessed to a degree in the States over the past year, is that when people actually have to start governing – which, one way or another, they will; because if the government doesn’t start balancing the budget the bond markets will do it for them – the public will be shocked by what really needs to happen, since no-one came clean with them before. In this situation, personality politics doesn’t serve to make the issues clear, it helps the politicians pretend that the worst of this crisis is over. It covers up the great big elephant with a nasty grin on its face that no-one wants to look at.

In which Alex asks himself whether it's possible for him to get any more cynical about British politics

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 23:21:00 +0000

Well, well, well. Even that perennial no news channel BBC News 24 gets it right some of the time, and I just saw quite an amusing little "fact check" piece in the run up to the UK election.

As we all know, the Tories are in a bit of a bind when it comes to policy. Their only idea is cutting taxes, and that doesn't really add up when you've got the deficit to end all deficits. (Lucky for them that they don't currently appear to need any policies for the wonderful British public to vote them in, anyway.)

Anyway, today's big news on the campaign trail was that the Tories are going to save huge resources by cutting benefit fraud, specifically by banning any individual caught cheating three times from receiving any state benefits for a period of up to three years. BBC makes one call to the benefits office and finds out that the total number of people currently identified as having caught cheating three times is .... zero.

Well, that'll deal with the deficit then! Question one: are these people actually supposed to be running the economy in a month's time? Question two: how exactly can politicians find it difficult to understand why everyone hates them when they demonstrate such contempt for the voting public as to announce a waste reduction policy likely to produce a total of zero pounds savings?

Not that it matters to me ... since my second discovery today is that my vote is worth a grand total of 0.063 of a full vote, anyway. See here for more details.

Health care: the last post?

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:46:00 +0000

At the risk of counting chickens, it appears that today congress will pass the most significant piece of healthcare reform since the 1960s and in so doing validate one of the central parts of the mandate that sent Barack Obama to office.

A relentless battle, each side pulling off more comebacks than Muhammad Ali and Bill Clinton in combination, has culminated in an extraordinary week of political manoeuvring in the House, leaving the Democrats within a hair’s breadth of passing this damned bill. Whatever happens, whether it’s a success or a failure, if this law gets to Obama’s desk, the President will have notched up his second major entry in the history books alongside his astonishing electoral triumph sixteen months ago.

After likening the collapse of Republican votes in the 2008 election to the 48 seats lost by the Democrats in the House in 1966, events which led fairly directly to Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election and the collapse of the Great Society coalition, former President Clinton argued in his keynote address at Netroots Nation last year that we were witnessing the building of a new Democratic majority, one perhaps comparable to the New Deal political order, that could keep the Republicans out of office for a generation.

This is hardly the first time a politician has predicted a bright future for the world under the guidance of their party, but the combination of sizeable demographic shifts, the slowing growth of the Republican base, and the relentless shrinkage unto zero of the Republican party’s moderate wing seemed to make it more plausible than most. Tanenhaus and others wrote books predicting "The Death of Conservatism." Indeed, it seemed that all the left needed to do was to bask in the glory of electoral victory and sign up to facebook groups declaring "I'm for Obama" for the United States to pass into a utopia of public options, universal coverage and cowed insurance companies.

Since then, of course, reports of the death of the American right have proven to be greatly exaggerated. Once again, the right showed itself to have learned the lessons of 1960s agit-prop more effectively than the left, managing to combine the power of tightly-controlled mass media outlets, an awesome talking points machine, and an outswelling of popular, grassroots anger against the distant elites of Washington who spent their way through the last two decades while the core of American industrial prosperity eroded.

Even though the Democrats carefully focused on building the majority necessary for passage of the bill in Washington, time and again Obama has been criticized for appearing to be too slow to go to the people, and too cautious to stick his neck out for the bill. While conservatives have been united in their opposition to change, liberals have been divided by the issues of how to change. Much of the grassroots enthusiasm for the Obama campaign fizzled away when it became clear that a single man, however capable he may be, could not change the political system of a nation as it had evolved over more than two centuries, nor somehow eliminate the fact that half of the American public don’t think the same way as the other half. Many on the left remember 2000 well enough to know that abandoning the Democrats is counterproductive to their interests, but it’s not surprising that the centrality of big business and insurance companies in the reform process cooled their enthusiasm for taking to the streets; especially as this was placed alongside a pragmatic, in many ways conservative, effort to rebuild the financial structures of Wall Street to something close to how they looked prior to the crash of 2008.

At the centre of this shift back and forth from hope to fear has been a slightly histrionic, slightly bipolar punditocracy, who have veered from hysterical optimism to maudlin depression on an oftentimes daily, certainly channel-by-channel basis. This group has probably done more than anyone to give the impression that more was changing than was actually the case. It’s easy to say so with hindsight, of course, but in truth the combination of a very fragile super-majority and a unified opposition was always likely to bring this affair to a head with a squeaky bum reconciliation bill. Certainly, there were plenty of voices saying that is what would happen last summer. Again and again, events have appeared to derail the slow process of moving toward a vote, but in the end the political interests of the Democrats were always going to be powerful forces for engineering loyalty in a party that recognises the Obama coattails are right now the only game in town.

Assuming the bill does finally get passed, two things will undoubtedly happen. First, it will change the lives of millions of Americans. Second, it will change the balance of forces in Washington. But since the impact of the first is likely to be very slow, almost intangible, the precise way that Washington will change is also hard to predict. In his Netroots keynote, Clinton argued that the passage of the reform bill would count as a vital contribution to the resurgent Democrats, since once it had passed and people’s lives started getting better, and once all the end of the world predictions that the Republicans were making didn’t come to pass, the Republicans would be discredited as the fraudsters they were. This is the same argument Obama has been using to great effect within his party in the last few weeks. Look, he says, the options are simple: watch the President be defeated on this bill and then see the Republicans sweep back into power, or support the President and prove to the American people that our ideas actually work.

There’s much to make this argument plausible: it wouldn’t have persuaded so many politicians otherwise. One of the ironies of the last year’s debates is that all the time Obama has been attacked for being dictatorial, he’s also been attacked for being too weak: too soft to be a president. (Interestingly, a similar thing happened with Tony Blair in his early years. Brits can hardly remember these days, Iraq has had such an overwhelming effect on the political memory, but when he first rose to power his nickname was Bambi.) Americans, like most of us, are a contradictory lot, and they like their leaders to be both headstrong and good listeners at the same time. And getting this bill through could give Obama’s image a touch of steel that has perhaps been missing to date.

But Democrats can’t repeat the over-optimistic predictions that they trotted out in November 2008 without a rude awakening. If people seriously think that evidence will be enough to restrain Republican opposition, they’ve understood nothing from the last year. This bill has reinvigorated the American right, and there’s no chance that Republican politicians will just give up now and go home once the bill becomes an act. First, they can continue to fight the measure – on the ground, in the states and, perhaps most importantly, in the courts. (FDR’s reform efforts were almost exclusively restrained by the judicial branch, not the legislature.) Second, they can continue to focus on the issue of their will being ignored. Whatever the outcome produced by the bill, this remains true. Third, they can target politicians who supported the bill for payback in the midterms. And fourth, they can scour the country looking for cases where things go wrong under the new law, especially as the complex adjustments are made, and point to them as evidence as proof they were right all along. Errors are bound to happen, and enough of them to fit any kind of narrative the Republicans care to construct.

In this sense, the battle never ends, the landscape just changes from time to time.

Much of this battle reminds me of the extraordinarily painful seven month negotiations that went into the passage of the Panama Canal Treaties during the Carter administration, which arranged for the ownership of the canal to be returned to Panama after roughly seven decades’ imperial control by the United States. Like the healthcare reform today, these bills too were considered to be long past necessary by a Democratic majority, a matter of natural justice as much as anything, a place where idealism and national interest intersected. They were also a matter of prior bipartisan support: the substance of them hammered out by Johnson, Nixon and Ford before being taken up by Carter. And the logic of the argument seemed like a no-brainer. The treaties would not abandon the strategic relationship between the US and Panama; the commercial importance of the canals seemed to be declining; and the improvement in relations between the Northern and Southern halves of the Americas would be critical at a time of otherwise declining influence. The claims made against the bills – notably, that handing the canal back to the Torrijos regime was the first step toward giving them to the Cubans and the Soviets – also seem with hindsight to have some eerie similarities with the claims made by the Republicans today. (Not surprising, really, since the right has been using the same arguments for eighty years or more.)

Still, the passage of the treaties did not produce the political payoff that was expected. Instead, they were vital in stimulating Reagan’s push to the head of the Republican party and, by extension, his victory in 1980. (42 percent of Republican Senators supported the Carter treaties in 1977; virtually none of them would have a place in the Republican party today.) The Democrats have more or less been proven right over time: Panama remains firmly controlled by the US, American commercial and strategic interests remain secure, and one reason for hating the gringos was taken away. But the benefits of the measures were slowly realised and intangible, while the anger generated on the right was powerful and immediate.

Does this mean that the healthcare reform bill will be looked back on in time as Obama’s equivalent to the canal treaties? Not necessarily. The benefits here, at least, accrue to Americans, some of whom may even vote. More importantly, the next election will be won or lost on one issue above all others: the economy. (And, as I’ve said before, if Obama doesn’t have the economy growing healthily by 2012, then he doesn’t deserve to be re-elected.) Here, we might even think of the health care reform as a second stimulus bill, since it will plough money into American pockets, not to mention releasing dampeners on commercial activity as people can move, quit and take up new jobs without worrying about leaving their families vulnerable to the vagaries of nature.

In short, there’s all to play for. But even if there weren’t, Democrats believed the bill needed to be passed. Johnson knew he was signing politics over to the Republicans by passing civil rights laws in the sixties, but it had to be done anyway. What’s the point, after all, in winning the presidency and the legislature, if you’re not going to use them to try and do something you believe in?

What goes around comes around...

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:28:00 +0000

From a New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin, on possibly soon to be outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stevens, one of the last remaining adherents of a Republican politics otherwise long since dead:

"John Paul Stevens, who will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on April 20th, generally bides his time. Stevens is the Court’s senior Justice, in every respect. He is thirteen years older than his closest colleague in age (Ginsburg) and has served eleven years longer than the next most experienced (Scalia)... In some respects, Stevens comes from another world; in a recent opinion, he noted that contemporary views on marijuana laws were 'reminiscent of the opinion that supported the nationwide ban on alcohol consumption when I was a student.'"

Individualists of the World, Unite!

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:46:00 +0000

Review of Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

Complexity and collapse? (Warning: wonkery ahead)

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 12:59:00 +0000

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs includes an article by Niall Ferguson called ‘Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos.’ Read it yourself, but the substance of the piece is that we should not think about the rise and fall of imperial systems in terms of traditional seasonal or cyclical narratives (which to Ferguson means Vico, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Kennedy and Jared Diamond), since empires, like all other social organizations, are complex adaptive systems subject to arrythmic changes. In normal person English, this means that the collapse of an imperial power like the modern United States can happen in a matter of months and years, not centuries.

The piece marks a continuing enthusiasm on the part of Ferguson, dating back at least to his Virtual History book, for thinking about history in the context of complexity theory, something I endorse – but with increasing caution as time wears on. There’s no doubt in my mind that societies are complex systems; this is self-evident. Ferguson’s warning about the potential speed with which one can collapse is also well taken. The problem is with how we go about taking the scientific model and applying it to the human world; and here I believe we should be much more cautious than Ferguson is being.

The question first arises when you ask yourself what, exactly, is different about Ferguson’s argument by being articulated in the language of complexity theory. Ferguson suggests that complexity theory should alter the way we understand causation: that the 9/11 attacks were not anything to do with Sayyid Qutb and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, only the politics of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s; that World War One “was actually caused by a series of diplomatic miscalculations in the summer of 1914”, not deep shifts in the nineteenth century imperial system. Proximate events, not deep social transformations, are the source of dramatic change.

But existing narratives account for this story quite adequately, if told right. Despite Ferguson’s attempt to suggest that all historians apart from him are trapped within fallacious narratives arcs, I don’t think many would reject the claim that change can come about suddenly and unexpectedly. Ferguson’s essential warning in this piece – that the US needs to be thinking about the risk of a sudden and dramatic shift in global power relations – seems to require no special theories to be plausible. (Surely at least Mr. Marx, with his rather peculiar enthusiasm for revolutions, can't really be said to be uninterested in dramatic shifts in equilibria?)

In the language of complexity, the stable state is a product of dynamic equilibrium, then an amplifier effect produces a dramatic phase shift. In the language of history, the old regime dominates the world yet rests on fragile foundations, so that a small spark produces a cataclysmic collapse. The story is exactly the same; only the language has changed.

This is a sleight of hand which gives the complexity metaphor greater impact than it actually offers, and causes Ferguson to dismiss deep causes entirely since they are only manifested through short term catalytic events. To reduce the argument ad absurdum, the massive discrepancy between income and house prices was nothing to do with the collapse of the stock market bubble; only one random person’s decision to default on a loan in Utah explained the financial crisis.

This can be seen most clearly when Ferguson goes on to talk about the example of imperial collapse more directly: “most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises,” he notes, “sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, as well as difficulties with financing public debt.” Well, where do these come from, if not deeper causes such as changing demographics and ideologies, leading to differential consumption and production habits in the society under examination? However much of the current debt has appeared due to the declining revenues and rising costs of deficit economics in the last year and a half, you still can’t explain the situation without reference to the deterioration of Western manufacturing and the growth of a credit-consumption economy, neither of which make sense as short-term cataclysmic stories. These may be latent, or sub-surface phenomena – things that are causing the system to rot from within yet with no apparent problems from without – but they’re still vital components of understanding why the dramatic shift takes place when it does.

It turns out, then, that the story is more or less the same as one that historians could tell you without the language of complexity theory. An apparently prosperous society might be masking deep fragilities, and that these might appear suddenly, apparently overnight even, when a particular contingent event catalyses a dramatic change. Not just an old-fashioned historian, even an early modern scholar steeped in the language of Biblical providentialism would be as equipped to make this observation as any modern complexity theorist.

The question thus remains: what does viewing the world in terms of complexity theory actually change?

The first possible response might be called “vulgar complexity theory.” This draws an equation between complex systems and chaotic or unstable behaviour. In fact, only some complex systems are unstable, and many may exhibit long periods of stability before a dramatic phase shifts. Some have dramatic shifts that come at entirely unpredictable moments. Others may even demonstrate extended periods of chaotic behaviour before stabilising entirely. Certainly, then, employing complexity theory doesn’t mean we should be any more pessimistic and hand’s off than we already are; or be any more optimistic and hand’s on, for that matter. It doesn’t actually change at all our normative beliefs about the future path of the world.

The second, related response is the one that Ferguson ventures toward at the end of his piece: that understanding empire as a complex system allows us to manage it more intelligently. “The attempt is worthwhile,” Ferguson writes, “because an understanding of how complex systems function is an essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure.” Fair enough, up to a point. But the problem with this is not so different to that faced by the vulgar complexity theorist. It presumes that, by recognizing a complex system as a complex system, we are somehow better able to stop it behaving like a complex system.

The problem with this is that we as actors are inescapably constituent parts of the thing we are examining. We are trapped in a feedback loop where our analysis of the world adjusts and alters the nature of the world, since it causes us to behave differently. Indeed, this is one of the main things that makes human society a complex system in the first place. The pessimism resulting from the crash of 2009 is no less a part of the overall phenomenon of market behaviour than was the excessive optimism of the Bush years. The human fallacy is to take ourselves out of the system and assume that we’re somehow watching things from the moon. In this sense, an old providentialist might actually be in a better position than we are, since at least he is fuelled by a belief that the ways of God cannot be understood, and so his ignorance is not multiplied by hubris.

We logically cannot hope to manage a complex non-linear system on these terms unless the system does not behave in an complex, non-linear way.

The validity of using complexity theory to explain changes in history in the way Ferguson is doing, then, has real limits. Understood correctly, complexity theory offers little way of accurately understanding and predicting, and therefore of mitigating, potential catastrophic change. In fact, deploying it this way often turns out to be just another clever method of masking one’s prejudices. For instance, Ferguson suggests that a deficit crisis could produce a rapid collapse of American power. The logical concomitant of this is that the US should be substantially more financially conservative than it is: batten down the hatches in expectation of the tsunami, fear what Nassim Taleb calls the ‘Black Swan.’ Massive cuts ahoy, it seems.

But might not a sudden and dramatic attempt by leaders to cut back state spending and increase revenues be exactly the kind of process that accelerates the collapse? After all, it was Gorbachev’s attempts to balance the budget in the Soviet Union that produced the fire sale deal on arms reduction with Reagan, which in turn led to the challenge and collapse of Soviet power throughout Eastern Europe.

We are inescapably participants in the system as well as analysts of it. This is why we can’t think about human society in the same way we might think about, say, forest fires. Being substantially more conservative and anticipating the black swan effect for a forest fire carries minimal risks and comparatively small costs, but it offers a major security advantage if the unpredicted event takes place. Human society does not work in the same way, since conservatism is not just a response to the system, it also forms part of the system.

Of course, I should add that this doesn’t suggest that an activist policy is any more or less misguided. The point is not to replace one prejudice with another. Taken to its extreme, it’s hard not to see the moral of complexity as being that there’s nothing we can do to anticipate unpredictable events. After all, the clue is in the name.

There is, though, a third way of thinking about society in terms of complexity theory, a way that offers less to a social scientist looking for policy prescriptions, but is in my view both more persuasive and more hopeful. The key here is not to think about complex systems just in terms of chaotic shifts in equilibrium, Ferguson’s principal metaphorical adoption, but also in terms of emergent behaviour: systems where astonishing, unpredicted solutions to problems emerge in unexpected ways, and demonstrate a power and impact far beyond what any single individual could achieve by trying to think through the system as a whole.

Focusing on emergent behaviour rather than the dynamics of the system suggests that our failure to understand perfectly how the system works may not necessarily be a problem. Maybe our attempts to manage the crisis will work. Maybe a solution will come in a completely unexpected way. It’s not, as Ferguson says, that “an understanding of how complex systems function is an essential part of any strategy to anticipate and delay their failure.” Instead, an understanding of complex systems simply allows us to be hopeful: to believe that, if we all try our best to act in a way that makes sense to us, something may emerge from somewhere to dramatically solve existential problems facing us; offering a vision that we all form part of a greater unit with a logic not so much beyond us as expressed through us.

While this offers no clear route to the future, no roadmap for where we as societies should go, at the very least it holds open the possibility that we can get there if we keep trying.

The great global nosh-up continues...

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:29:00 +0000

In another great 'voice of reason' piece in the LRB, John Lanchester acutely summarises the fix we're in. The combination of an arrangement of electoral interests that provides no opportunity for fiscal discipline; an unwillingness to restrain the big banks meeting ignorance about how exactly to do so without damaging 'honest' banking; and a looming debt hangover that will make us realise quite how comparatively mild the cost of the recession has been so far (compared, that is, both to prior recessions and the inescapable mathematics of how much we've paid to keep our economies moving) ... all this leads to only one likely outcome: inflation.

"The government has to cut the deficit. That involves raising taxes and cutting spending. The government can’t do it too quickly, or it would tip the country back into recession. But the government will have to administer some cuts in spending, because the bond market insists on it. The government can’t cut too thoroughly, because the electorate won’t wear it. Inflation looks like the only way out. Not too much inflation, because the bond market wouldn’t like that. Also, the rules currently forbid it – but the rules, let’s face it, are the least of the problems."

When alienating the voters or the power elite gets thrown out of the window, inflation is the variable that allows the global economic equation to add up back to zero.

And in the midst of this, the bankers continue to gorge.

"Goldman Sachs clearly thought they were exercising heroic self-denial by awarding themselves a compensation pool amounting to a mere $16.2 billion. Haiti’s total GDP is $7 billion, and even before the earthquake one child in eight died before its fifth birthday; imagine Goldman turning over half its trough to Haiti in an attempt to change those numbers. Instead they praised their own ‘restraint’ in awarding themselves only 36 per cent of their revenue in pay pool, down from the usual 50 per cent."

Lanchester's half-hearted attempt to find some source of positive news amongst all this is the possibility that this represents the last fling of an old aristocracy aware that the mob is at the gates.

"The bank bonuses this year are so grotesque that there are only two explanations for them. One is that investment banking culture truly is psychotic, in the strict sense of being out of touch with reality. That’s possible. The other explanation is that, as a French economist said to me when the crunch kicked in, ‘It’s over.’ He meant the whole obscene-bonus culture, the model in which the banks’ shareholders let the bankers pay themselves half what the bank ‘earns’, in the context of a regulatory and political framework in which the banks are allowed to do whatever they like. The proposals now being touted do not guarantee systemic safety, but taken together they will, for sure, make the system much less profitable. Maybe, just maybe, the bankers are pigging out this year because they suspect this is the last of the good times. If we’re looking for a glint of silver lining, does that count?"

Unfortunately, John, call me a pessimist, but I think your first option seems more plausible than the second.

Democracy building in Afghanistan

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:51:00 +0000

After Hamid Karzai's latest act, appointing all the members of the electoral commission so that in future it won't do troubling things like point out his widespread involvement in voting fraud, any attempt to defend NATO policy in Afghanistan on the grounds of democracy promotion sounds fairly stale. Does anyone remember those justifications circulated at the time of the original invasion - that by overthrowing the Taliban we'd be able to secure rights for women living behind the burkah? How quaint and outmoded they seem now.

"We were puzzled and disturbed last year when the Obama administration didn’t — or couldn’t — persuade Mr. Karzai to run a reasonably clean race," writes the New York Times. "Aren’t tens of thousands of American troops and billions of dollars in American aid enough leverage?" Well, no, unfortunately they're not. Karzai is no fool; he knows that politically and militarily the US is deeply exposed through its commitment to solving Afghanistan's problems, and that no president could deal with the domestic political fallout of straightforwardly giving up and going home. At this stage, like it or not, the Karzai government is the only game in town. The presence of US troops is no leverage when they're only there to meet self-interested commitments.

Moreover, corruption is a systemic phenomenon; blaming Karzai alone falsely implies that simply putting a different person in power would end a condition endemic to Afghan life.

What's most disturbing about the current situation is the increasing divergence between political debate in the West about the situation in Afghanistan, and the geopolitical realities facing the Western powers. If you switched on to most TV channels or read most blogs, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the choice that NATO faces is withdrawing and letting the Taliban thrive, or staying and building a democracy. But this language of democracy building is only marginally more hubristic than the old Rumsfeld axiom that democracies emerge simply by removing dictatorships.

Unfortunately, at the moment it looks like what the United States and other powers are engaged in in Afghanistan, is building a military dictatorship. Probably this will be a military regime that maintains a pretence of electoral democracy, but it will be a military dictatorship all the same. With virtually no exceptions, this has been the condition that pre-capitalist states have developed into following American interventions in the past, and despite the world moving on there's little so far to suggest the outcome will be different here.

Why? First, because when it comes to a choice between the liberal, democratic aspirations of Western foreign policy and fundamental questions of national security, the second always wins. It may not seem to be a choice in the formulation commonly trotted out by politicians. But when wars against insurgencies become conflicts of attrition, pressure for withdrawal grows on the home front and this inevitably raises the possibility of a trade off. If Karzai can exploit the military operations taking place at the moment to build an Afghan army capable of keeping the Taliban insurgency pinned down to a small few regions of Afghanistan, then the West will take that deal even if it doesn't come with a functioning democratic system.Obama has to date oscillated between the rhetoric of liberalism and the policy of a more traditional conservative. But when it comes to foreign policy in the midst of a financial crisis, sooner or later everyone's a realist.

Second, and related, the basic actions of the NATO forces in Afghanistan today are focused upon a single task: securing territory in a sustainable manner by creating an overwhelmingly powerful military, capable of claiming a monopoly or near monopoly over the use of violence. This incentivises leaders to promote the interests of the army above all others. But more fundamentally, it means that there will be only one real power left on the ground when NATO withdraws.

Democracy doesn't happen in nations because everyone agrees consensually that it's a good idea: it happens when centres of power develop which are capable of effectively restraining one another, thus requiring formalised procedures to manage dissent. First, an independent landed aristocracy restraining the monarch, then a yeoman class of small farmers requiring obligations from the aristocracy. After that, a middle class of merchants, traders, and businesspeople, and finally mass movements of workers, petty bourgeois employees and tertiary sector workers: these groups represent not just different parts of a society but also alternative sources of power, ones that are capable of resisting each other and thus forced to reach some kind of modus operandi. Madison was never more right in point out that faction must quell faction. And in effect, none of these groups exist in Afghanistan.

Instead, in Afghanistan, you have a society of militarised tribal groups dominated by powerful local bosses or warlords. Any central government must therefore have sufficient strength to be able to either dominate or co-opt these powerful groups. Even constructing this kind of a balance of authority and power is a difficult task: just ask Chiang Kai-Shek. So it's ridiculous to expect a Western state suddenly to appear. Since neither side is concerned with the issue, democracy just doesn't come into it.

Conversion narratives

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:12:00 +0000

After hardly taking them seriously most of last year, and after more or less predicting the death of the American right wing politics the winter before, it seems now that the mainstream media is bending over backwards to take the Tea Party movement seriously. From the sublime to the ridiculous, as usual. A crop of journalists have packed themselves off for the middle states, embedded themselves with the enemy, and begun sending reports back from the frontline of American politics.

Just as they overestimated how fundamentally Obama’s victory had altered the basic balance of American politics, now they’re overestimating how powerful the populist right is. But at least they're bothering to actually look at what's going on. Rather than just taking pictures of loonies nursing heavy weaponry hanging from their necks, or waving placards that a seven year old with basic phonics skills should be able to improve on, the hunt is on now to find “normal” people joining the ranks of the movement and building something dramatically new and dangerous.

This, presumably, is the reason David Barstow opted to begin his great article in the New York Times about the Tea Party movement with the story of Pam Stout. Pam was a “happily retired” lady, a mild, former government employee who – “Worried about hyperinflation, social unrest or even martial law” – joined up with an Idaho branch of the Friends of Liberty and in so doing abandoned her lifelong political inactivity.

Thus we see the return of one of the most popular elements of American biographical history: the conversion narrative. In this case, the transformation is from politically unconcerned citizen to raging, fear-fuelled antiradical. But this is nothing new to the Tea Party activists. Throughout history all that's remained consistent is that Americans keep changing their minds. Whether one looks to the jeremiads of the Puritan colonies, the redemption myth in Frederick Douglass’ narrative of slavery and escape to freedom, or even the autobiography of Malcolm X, conversion narratives have been a staple of American life for centuries.

Of course, it suits Tea Party organizers to play up the role of new converts since this contributes to a sense of political inertia: a powerful tool in itself. Putting new recruits in the headlines gives the movement a sense that history is on their side, that people are wising up to the truth of their claims. But we can’t entirely explain the centrality of conversion narratives just by pointing out that they serve the interests of canny political propagandists. Clearly average joes must like to punctuate the stories they tell about their lives with moments of Pauline transformation, or they wouldn't spend their time saying so to journalists.

Such stories offer a way of personalising your life in a world that is otherwise made up of vast and overwhelming forces, markets and systems of power. For the religious convert being born again, God himself looks down from the heavens and selects you. For the secular activist, a moment of discovery – often attached to joining a group or reading a political tract – provides a similar, personal moment of contact with history, a sense of agency that might otherwise be robbed from an insignificant retiree living anonymously in Sandpoint, Idaho. Your life suddenly speaks to the major events of the time. Rather than just another forgotten soul, the conversion narrative makes you a centre-piece in the nation's history.

We all love to tell stories about ourselves, to explain our behaviour in this way in order to give meaning to the paths we choose through our lives. But it can sometimes be deceptive to take these stories at face value. In this case, the effect of reading too much into the conversion narrative is to downplay how much the Tea Party movement owes to its political predecessors. I’m not saying that Pam Stout didn’t undergo the change she described – I have no more reason to doubt her than I have to believe her. But you have to convert to something: if there isn’t a pre-existing movement to give you an explanation for your anger then no conversion is going to happen whether you’re looking for it or not.

It might seem counter-intuitive to talk about stability on the right when so many of its barmstormers are so manifestly unstable. Given that the ideology of the far right is so caught up in apocalyptic fantasies, it seems difficult to believe that it can have anything so moderate as a tradition. But when you look at the history, a different picture emerges. The John Birch Society, one of the many groups Barstow highlights in his piece, have been around for more than half a century, each year managing to get even more angry with government than they were the previous one, never at any point substantially disturbed that the system hasn't come crashing down as they expected it to. And frankly, in terms of apocalyptic traditions, half a century is the tip of the iceberg. Dispensationalist millenarian fundamentalists have been predicting the imminent end of the world for a century or more.

So when we, or our journalists, are told about the dramatic conversions that are taking place in the Tea Party movement, how people are waking up across the country and declaring they’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, perhaps we should wait a moment. More often than not, actually a lot less has changed than might appear to be the case on the surface. And the solution is a lot less complicated than it might otherwise appear. Get people some jobs, and things will suddenly start to look a lot less apocalyptic again ... until the next time arrives for people to suddenly realise that everything has changed and life can never be the same as before...

Back again

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:19:00 +0000

For various reasons, including overwork, I’ve let the blog slide for the last couple of months or so. Coming back to it, you start to realize that you’ve grown a virtual garden then gone away and let the weeds grow out of control. Dozens of comments unreplied (sorry!), over 800 messages, spams and updates in the e-mail account attached to the site, 120 facebook friend requests: there’s some serious overgrowth here, and this weekend has been designated for a blitz to try and get things back in control.

And then: back in business!

Well, that's another fine mess you've got me into...

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:59:00 +0000

What a shambles. The Brown government employs a scientific advisory council to provide them with supposedly objective information on the dangers of various illegal drugs, then refuses to listen to their advice. When the head of the council, David Nutt, points out that the government is ignoring their advice, they sack him. Other scientists resign in protest. The government’s attempt to present Nutt’s sacking as an issue of authority rather than scientific probity falls flat.

As much as I disagree with their decision on this, the Brown administration is not actually failing in this situation because they decided to pander to Daily Mail readers. Their failure lay in first stating that they would follow the scientific analysis, then ignoring the science when it didn't say what they wanted it to.

There’s no reason why social policies have to be solely driven by scientists. I thought it was ridiculous and absurd that when we decided as a society to ban smoking in public places, we did so almost entirely on the recommendations of health experts. Health experts have no absolute right to control my freedom because they operate within a scientific milieu, as much as they presume to. Nor is public health a value that takes precedence over all others. If it was, we’d ban driving tomorrow. Smoking is not just a health issue, and it is not logical to say that just because something is harmful it should be banned. Such decisions also speak to the kind of society we want to live in, and thus have strong social, civic and civil liberties components to them as well.

In the same way that we don’t only want policemen’s views when it comes to deciding how long we should incarcerate people without trial, we don’t just want to hear from scientists when it comes to the prohibition and legalisation of dangerous substances. Actually, I agree with the scientists on the particular questions of classification here. But even so I don’t see any reason why the government couldn’t simply have said in the first place that they would consult with scientists as well as the public generally, and a selection of civic and moral leaders about their views, and form a policy accordingly. The idiocy is in trying to pretend you’re being somehow objective when you’re clearly not.

Underpinning this is a bigger question about the role of expertise in modern society. Ever since Walter Lippmann wrote about it in the 1920s, the expert or specialist has come to take on an increasingly vital role in virtually every walk of life. We want clinical experts to make the best decisions about the right kinds of treatments we can afford; civic planners to understand how best to maintain our infrastructure; specialist economists to understand how our financial system should be regulated; and so on. We should listen to scientists if they say that the levies in New Orleans need repairing.

But the problem is that such classes of expert often tend to develop particular biases of their own that inevitably compromise their expertise and undermine their claims to objectivity. In particular, the need for self-perpetuation tends to create many distorting pressures.

In this particular case, it seems clear that medical experts have a significantly lower aversion threshold to medication than much of the rest of the population: hence the decision by GPs to hand out antidepressants like sweeties. Such aversions can’t be wholly dealt with based on formal assessments of harm, since it is a question of social values as much as medicinal effectiveness. And my gut feeling is that scientists have a tendency to overstate their degree of certainty when it comes to engaging in public debate, anyway.

Moreover, they're scientists nor PR experts, and tend to misunderstand how their messages will be interpreted by the media. Hence the classic phenomenon when scientists are asked to predict how many people might die from a particular epidemic. They go off and built a model that, due to the massive uncertainty in such efforts, says that between 35 and 35 million people will die. They give it to the press. The press headines the next day say "35 MILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM FLU OUTBREAK."

So the question is how to balance the need for expertise in the modern world, when the man on the street often simply isn’t qualified to provide a policy judgement, with the democratic need to hold policies accountable to the general will of the people and to reflect broader views about the kind of society we want than just a reductivist scientific assessment of a virtuous life. If we can’t say that whatever everybody wants is necessarily right; and neither can we say that the expert view is true; on what basis do we form our public policies?

University literacy standards

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Courtesy of HNN, I read this article by William O’Neill, which reports that the percentage of American graduates proficient in prose literacy has fallen by around 25%. “Apart from the oldest graduates having died the addition of ten, or at most eleven, graduating classes to the pool of college graduates, meant that the members of these classes had to have scored very badly indeed to drag down the averages of the entire population by so much,” O’Neill reports. “Further, the graduates tested in 1992 were themselves not particularly literate for the declining performance of college students probably dates from somewhere around 1980. Had there been an NAAL in 1970, at a guess, a solid majority of graduates would have been proficient in both prose and document literacy.”

Let us all be horrified with the awfulness of modern universities. “So we have the modern public university on the undergraduate level, where grade inflation is rampant, student skills diminish with every passing year, what passes as teaching is conducted by exploited adjuncts and faculty members who no longer care about standards—for students, that is, the drive for ever-more qualified professors continues unabated. It is a central irony of our situation that while mediocrity among undergraduates is tolerated and even encouraged, the professoriat demands excellence of its members, and of graduate students too as they are potential members.”

Ok, as a university lecturer I have a vested interest in rejecting this characterisation, even if I’m not directly implicated in the US case. But, whatever: let me raise the possibility that the problem might be not that graduates have a problem with literacy, but that Mr. O’Neill has a problem with numeracy.
In 1990, 20.3% of the US population’s 259 million people, or around 52.2 million people were graduates. In 2000, 24.4% of 291 million people – that is, 71 million – were graduates. (Sources: here and here) If the same proportion of the population were graduates in 2000 that had been in 1990, 20.3%, that would have meant that around 59 million were graduates rather than 71 million.

In short, the graduate population rose by about twenty million in the 1990s, fifty percent of which can be put down to the increased size of the population, and fifty percent due to an expanded graduate sector. Graduate numbers have therefore grown by substantially more than the graduate literacy rate has fallen. Right now there are around 14 million people undergoing higher education in the United States, a higher proportion than any other society in the world.

Fairly obviously, an increase in the intake will produce lower quality results. Partly this is because the standard of education will be poorer: clearly, you can teach ten people something more effectively than a hundred. But also it’s just a logical product of the supply of students: you’re naturally going to be accepting students of lower educational attainment if you want to raise the number of people attending. That’s why even the most ill-educated high school principal will focus on “value added” by teachers rather than overall attainment levels when it comes to assessing how well they’re doing. If these numbers are right – that the literacy rate among graduates has fallen at a notably lower rate than graduate numbers have risen – it suggests that the universities are having a net positive effect on literacy.

Examining only the cohort of university students is a classic fallacy. It implies that the cohort is identical in 1990 and 2000. What’s more meaningful is the overall literacy rate in the US. And if we go to the very data that Mr. O’Neill cited to highlight the falling standards of university education – the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) report - we see that the average literacy score for adults in the United States declined by at most a fraction of a percent in the 1990s. For Mr. O’Neill’s vision of falling standards to be accurate, that would mean that the drop in graduate standards would have had to be entirely made up by an equivalent rise in the literacy standards of non-graduates. Either he’s talking nonsense, or self-learners are doing a really fantastic job!

Grade inflation is real. Mass teaching is real. Underfunding is real. We’re no longer in a world where five percent of the population can be groomed for leadership and the rest ignored. But let’s not perpetuate the myth that faculty are failing to provide students a decent education as the modern university sector transforms. Most faculty I know work themselves raw to deliver exactly this kind of service. Most are doing a fantastic job teaching more and more people every year, and they should be praised for it.

Sitting atop politics

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:31:00 +0000

This morning began with another indictment of Obama on the breakfast table: condemned for compromising too much, for looking too hard for Republican support, for failing to understand the true nature of modern Republicanism. This time it came from David Bromwich, a professor of literature and political thought at Yale, in the London Review of Books. Obama is naive and afraid, Bromwich says:

“His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one’s enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?”

If you think that all this effort is just about winning over Olympia Snowe, then it probably does seem a bit much. I am as disappointed with anyone over the compromises Obama has made on the vexed questions of the secret services, abuse and secrecy; and I think he could have been smarter in his dealings with Wall Street and been more willing to use the stick (why has anti-trust made no appearance in this debate, yet?).

Nevertheless, may I venture the suggestion that perhaps the clever man is not so stupid, that the accusation of delusion in politics usually equates to a failure by one individual to comprehend why another doesn’t think or act the same way as they do. Underlying this is a further failure: a failure to understand that Americans do not live in a dictatorship, that politics is not in the hands of any single individual – even the president – to direct according to his whim, and that we should probably be glad about it, since every Obama will, sooner or later, be followed by a Bush.

First, it is an astonishing and insulting statement coming from a comfortable academic (who I presume has neither been threatened with assassination nor had direct experience of Obama under fire) to conclude that the president's political decisions are being driven by fear of physical violence. I suspect that once you rise above a dozen ongoing assassination attempts on your person at any one time, then having two times, three times or four times more nutbags training their gun sights on you probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. Without evidence to the contrary, I see no sign that the president is a coward, and think it’s a bit cheap to suggest so.

Second, it is a fundamental misunderstanding to think that Obama is seeking to conciliate the hard-right Birther Teabagging Rush Limbaugh Glenn Beck shoot-yourself-in-the-forehead wing of the Republican party. Bromwich claims that Obama fails to understand that Republicans today are like John C. Calhoun. But it is beyond belief to conclude that a man who has to work near to (and often with) several hundred Republicans every day does not understand “what Republicans are like” as well as, if not better than, Professor Bromwich.

Conciliating the hard right was never the goal, nor is it now. It is an easy straw man to burn, to say that it was and is. The key battle was and is the centre ground. And against the image perpetuated by most of the world’s media, including the American media, most US citizens don’t actually resemble the loony-tunes on the far right. Most of them like the ideas of reasonableness and compromise, and are driven more by self-interest and a desire to protect their lifestyles and families than anything else. But they’re also nationalistic, and tend to buy into a fair amount of the fear-mongering put out by the right over the past half century. This is why President Bush ran as a compassionate conservative in 2000, but could shift to a hard right line after September 11.

The message, then, is addressed at the centre of American politics, not so much in terms of the Democratic party structure and congressional membership (although there is some of this), but more importantly at moderate voters. These individuals not only share many concerns over the size of the state and the size of the deficit, but they also wish to see their politicians behave in a reasonable manner toward one another. And, like it or not, unlike the Democratic left, these voters have somewhere else to go.

I can’t remember a president that didn’t talk about governing for all the people; even Lincoln did as he was going to war against a section of them! Even though the truth was far more complicated, President Lincoln went to great lengths to paint himself as the compromise party so that the Confederates would appear as the aggressors. The South, of course, did exactly the opposite.

Moreover, the structure of the American two party system gives a prominence to ideologically-driven activists within the parties, and this can often disguise the inclinations of the far-less politically driven public at large or the size or importance of the “bulge” of normal voters in the centre. As I’ve said before and will no doubt say again, the divisions within the modern Democratic party are a product of its breadth of reach over left and centre of the political spectrum and thus a sign of strength, while the unity within modern Republicanism is a product of the party representing no more than a third of the country, and therefore a sign of weakness.

Failing to understand the real purpose of the compromise strategy ensures that Bromwich sees successes as failures. During Obama’s astonishing health care speech on 9 September, as we all know Joe Wilson gave his own, less carefully articulated two word response. “So the discord that the 9 September address was meant to salve showed its face again at the speech itself,” Bromwich writes.

Obviously not. The speech was not intended to help with whatever personal or psychological difficulties that drive Mr. Wilson’s Tourette’s. It was designed to speak to the unconvinced third of the population who had been scared by the August protests, who already had health care coverage, and who were not convinced of the benefits of a trillion dollar spending bill in the midst of the worst financial crisis in living memory. Right or wrong, these people exist and Obama would be a fool to ignore them and focus only on speaking to the uninsured, who also tend to be the least likely to vote. Not only did Obama’s speech help to assuage those concerns, but Mr. Wilson’s outburst did so even more, further placing the Republicans outside the pale.

It’s also worth emphasizing that some of the values that liberals decry as hopeless compromises with the Republican right fit comfortably within Democratic party philosophy. Not all economic liberals are social liberals. Not all economic liberals understand the same thing by the term. Hostility toward outsiders is expressed more violently in the Republican party, and tends more often to be associated with images of armed minutemen patrolling the Mexican border. But many Democrats fear the effect of outsiders on jobs and wages and domestic industrial production. It is not so easy to say that the Republicans are the anti-immigrant party and the Democrats are all free marketeers and Latinos, as Bromwich implies. Or, as he states more clearly, that Obama’s softness on Israel is a product of pandering to the Republican right. Many Democrats are also strongly committed to a pro-Israel policy, even if the most anti-Israel attitudes do tend to cluster on the left.

Presidents sit atop a pyramid of politics. Very occasionally they can shape what they work with. But more often than not they are shaped by what they are given. Imposing a line from above without regard to the beliefs of different constituencies is almost destined to failure.

President Franklin Roosevelt, so regularly praised as the single most successful left-of-centre president in the twentieth century, so often used as a foil with which to beat Obama, was persistently criticized during his presidency for refusing to support an anti-lynching bill. But FDR believed that putting his weight behind such a bill would have immediately alienated the Democratic South and put to an end the rest of his reform programme. Similarly, with the Social Security Act, he was criticized for excluding many of the most vulnerable groups (such as domestic servants and agricultural workers). But he got the bill through, and in such a way that in seventy years its opponents have made not a dent on it. Roosevelt shifted to the left in the year or so before his 1936 re-election fight, and it is not impossible that we’ll see similar shifts under an Obama administration. But this was impelled by a militant labour movement capable of delivering him electoral victory, itself being pushed forward at breakneck pace not by radical leaders but the militancy of rank-and-file workers in industries across the country.

Today, with a weak labour movement and no meaningful alternative source of left-wing strength, the Democrats will continue to need middle class centrists to get into power, to pass reform laws, and to fulfil their agenda. Leftists who oppose this are at their most clear-sighted when they focus on building new institutions from the grassroots, as the right has been doing since the 1960s, not when they spend their time attacking the president. Attacking the president in a climate of structural, systemic weakness on the left, is little more than transference, blaming him problems that, in truth, we all own.

Problems viewing?

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:39:00 +0000

One of my readers has been reporting continuing problems viewing this site, loading and adding comments. For the life of me, I've no idea why.

Can I ask, is this a more general problem people are experiencing? If so could you let me know - especially if you have any idea of how I might solve the problem. I wouldn't want to make my ramblings any more inaccessible than they already are...

Peaceniks and warniks

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:06:00 +0000

I was planning on avoiding comment on the whole Obama/Nobel thing, until this morning’s op-ed from Ross Douthat in the New York Times landed in my inbox, arguing that the president should have refused the prize. Not content to point out some of the damaging political consequences of Obama's acceptance, Douthat argued that his acceptance was a “travesty”.

Let’s be clear about this: the Nobel Prize has attained a certain universal status because of the broad aspirations it stands for and the many inspiring individuals who have received it. But it is a political tool operated by a small group of politically-driven individuals, not a genuinely universal institution. The Nobel Prize is not the equivalent to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Moreover, the underlying philosophy as laid out by Alfred Nobel reflects a particular view of the road to peace, and one that was to a degree influenced by the traditional Kellogg-Briand style peace efforts that so manifestly failed to avert generalised war twice in the twentieth century. There can be little doubt that the efforts of northern European states to promote reconciliation between warring parties in several regions of the world has been nothing short of amazing, and has at times even worked. But like it or not, what has worked most effectively in the past half century to limit the real danger, global warfare, has been the combination of genuinely multilateral institutions like the United Nations, providing a forum for the negotiation of the coagulated will of the world; and the deterrent effect of nuclear weaponry.

The prize, then, is a political object that reflects the political views of Alfred Nobel, refracted through a small group of well-meaning Nordic liberals. This doesn’t invalidate it, but it does politicize it. Moreover, as has been widely observed this week, the committee's intention to operate as a political mechanism means that the award – as in this case – is often given in the anticipation of events to be completed rather than for triumphs already achieved. Nobody would consider the idea of giving out the Nobel Prize for Literature to someone who’s just written a promising first novel, but this is defended for the Peace Prize. Why? Because it is not really a prize. It’s propaganda.

Propaganda for peace is a pretty good thing. The only problem is if it doesn't work. And if those five individuals who unanimously awarded the prize to Obama believed they were helping to further his political agenda, they were pretty naive. I remember an effort in The Guardian during the 2004 election to phone up Americans in swing states and to encourage them to vote for Kerry. Guess how that one went down. In truth, the prize didn't sway people who support the president or people who hate him; it simply confirmed their pre-existing beliefs.

If pushed, I might go so far as to say that the Nobel committee probably made a tactical mistake giving the award to Obama this year. The committee got itself Obama-ized.

That said, though, what is absolutely astonishing is that American right wingers should be saying that Obama should have refused the award once it was offered, or that his acceptance of it is somehow a blot on the president’s reputation. Ok, so you don’t happen to agree with the Norwegians who handed your president a prize. You don't think their vision of politics is correct. Don’t you think it’s quite nice anyway that people in other countries like and respect the person who runs your country? That they think he might help further the cause of world peace?

Do you only want presidents who are feared and hated by the rest of the world? Is that really what this is about?

Don’t agree with the politics? Fine. Ignore them. That’s the point about Norwegians (no offence intended). They’re hardly going to make your life a misery if you say “Thank you very much” and take no notice of them, which is presumably what Obama will do. In fact, they’ll probably be perfectly happy about it and head to do some cross country skiing or reconcile something else. So why all the hatred? What is wrong with people who can respond to good intentions with such fury?

In the 1930s, Henry Ford – largely in response to the vicious campaign of anti-Semitic propagandizing he launched across the forecourts of Ford Motor Company in the early 1920s – was given a medal of honour by Hitler. Dozens of groups demanded that he give the medal back, and when he refused this was widely seen as a stain upon his honour. Is this how far we’ve come in eighty years: that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, a group of people whose sole job is to try and reward individuals for promoting the cause of peace, has now taken the place of Nazi Germany in the rhetorical framework of the American right?

Health care, the story so far

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:40:00 +0000

Great summary of this summer's health care from Elizabeth Drew in the New York Review of Books...

"It's apparent that Obama is still learning the differences between campaigning and governing. And sometimes his inexperience shows. His speeches on health care on Labor Day and before Congress a few days later drew on his old rhetorical skills and finally showed some passion, and the one before Congress was his most effective so far in combining both rhetoric and explanation. But it was of interest that Chuck Todd of NBC reported that before he gave those speeches Obama's staff had had to get him "fired up" to take on his critics. Obama, whose high self-esteem is well known among close observers, had previously assumed that a "following," a "movement," would be there without his having to do much to stimulate it.

...

"The White House and the Democratic leaders in Congress are counting on enough Democrats supporting a final health care bill because the alternative—losing another chance for universal health care—would be more devastating to their political futures, and to Obama's presidency, than any compromises they make along the way. And its consequences would be felt for a long time. For some time the odds have appeared to favor passage of a health care bill. But the road to getting there is still full of hazards. If Obama does get a bill that contains significant health insurance reforms and substantially expands coverage, he will have achieved more than any other president has, and under far more difficult circumstances. Then the assessment of him will—or should—be quite different than it was around Labor Day."

Evgeny Morozov: How the Net aids dictatorships

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Speechless

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:17:00 +0000

h/t: Below the Beltway

Victor Hugo and some cotton buds

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:10:00 +0000

Kate Muir of The Times (h/t: normblog) writes about the Chavez book programme, whereby Chavistas are distributing literature to encourage broader reading among the masses of Venezuelans who, until recently, were functionally illiterate. Influenced by El Presidente's own shelves, Victor Hugo, Eduardo Galeano and Simon Bolivar are, unsurprisingly, pretty high up on the list, along with a pile of anticapitalist stuff ranging from intriguing to turgid to soul-sapping. Friedman and Hayek, surprisingly enough, don't get a mention!

An interesting reporter might have read some of the books on the list, examined how different they were, and perhaps discussed how the ideas within them might influence the way Venezuelans interpret the world. But this is a puff piece so I probably shouldn't expect too much. What we want is the solid, simple image and then a few coffee and croissant jokes at the end for a nice, self-satisfied morning read. Muir tries to make the book programme sound like a darkly menacing project of mass indoctrination, but I don't think even she can bring herself fully to believe it. The best she can do is note that groups are assigned "a group leader who structures discussions and at first encourages people to read aloud." A description that fits rather accurately my experience of primary school.

Muir generously admits that a government sponsored plan to distribute books is not the same as Nineteen Eighty Four, Fahrenheit 451, or "Nazi's Germany's attack on degenerate literature." But she neglects to explain, given this fact, why it was necessary to mention such comparisons in the first place. I'd like to point out that The Times is nothing at all like a smug and pompous broadsheet for little Englanders who believe that the whole world should be like Tunbridge Wells.

The truth doesn't make good reading. It's a damply unsatisfying conclusion for closed-minded readers to note that Chavez's efforts might be good and bad at the same time. And so, neglecting the fact that most of the people involved in the scheme will never have read books before, Muir concludes that the government distribution of books is "an extraordinary narrowing of opportunity for readers."

"Foreign titles used to make up 80 per cent of sales, but now because of recent currency and import restrictions on “non-essential goods” it is almost impossible to buy certain books, even pulp such as Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. And while the officially listed books are free or the equivalent of £1.50, Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone was seen by a writer from PublishingPerspectives.com in one Caracas bookshop, priced at £80."

This leaves me in a quandary. I've been critical of Chavez's economic policies and have been watching the growth of personalism in Venezuela over the past decade with great concern. But Muir's brave new world of market freedom is almost enough to have me heading for the Big Red Door, having witnessed what the big book companies have done to our once great reading habits in the West. If I were being provocative, I'd be tempted to argue that the relentless focus on a smaller and smaller number of commercially appealing but intellectually empty titles, a product of the consolidation of publishers and distributors in the Anglo-American marketplace, amounts to an "an extraordinary narrowing of opportunity for readers." The result has been Dan Brown selling a hundred million books but not actually being able to string a sentence together. The first chapter of The Lost Symbol, by the way, is available for download from the very same page of the Times website, just to the right of Muir's article. The audio version, of course, since actually reading is probably a bit too much effort. Thanks Rupert!

Let's face it. Reading a Dan Brown is the educative equivalent of spooning a year's learning out of your head with a melon baller. And if I were given a choice between freely reading Harry Potter provided cheaply in the marketplace, or getting to read Les Miserables at the cost of an hour's wrangling from an ideologue at the end of the session, Monsieur Hugo and a pair of earplugs is frankly the only sensible choice. Looks like I'd better be buying my red shirt and beret and jumping on that plane...

What is Obama's direction in foreign policy?

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:56:00 +0000

Perhaps it's unfair to say so, but Obama has to date come across as sharing some of his liberal predecessors’ problems when it comes to foreign policy, much of it relating to that old “vision thing”. The simple fact is that a blinkered, ideological and stupid foreign policy is easy to sell to the public, whereas complexity is, well, complex. Few people had much doubt about what the Bush administration wanted to do after 9/11, even if they hated it. By contrast, Obama is trying to juggle a number of balls at the same time: to undercut America’s imperialistic image in the rest of the world; strengthen ties with the great powers of the twenty first century, Russia, China and India; deliver demonstrable progress in the effort to destroy Al Qaeda and, secondarily, the Taliban; yet not get bogged down in another Vietnam in the process. Necessarily, all these juggling balls whirling around makes the strategy less clear in the selling.

But there is also some evidence to suggest that the strategy is simply less clear per se, that the administration is still trying to figure out exactly what it wants to do with many of these issues well into its first year in power, and which of the many foreign policy issues facing him are the priorities. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Clinton administration, which also focused primarily on domestic matters upon taking office, and took too long to figure out what it was actually trying to achieve in its relations with the rest of the world. And it’s not exactly reassuring.

Nevertheless, some general tendencies to seem to be emerging, and we will have to watch them over the coming months to see how they resolve themselves.

Firstly, the Obama administration has shown less interest in playing nice with the traditional allies – Britain, Israel, Colombia, Saudi Arabia – than his predecessor. (See, for instance, the hoo-ha in the UK about the apparent “snub” of Brown at the UN this week, here, here and here.) Less revealing than the substance – Obama’s a busy man, why should he waste his political capital bailing out a PM before his party conference when he's most likely going to be out of a job next year, anyway? – is the fear that this seems to have generated amongst a bored section of the British media. Diplomatic sensitivities should never be underestimated, especially if the best present you can think of for a head of state is a boxed set of DVDs. It may be that these relationship are being taken for granted at a time when others need cultivation; it may be a product of ideology; it may be a conscious attempt to assert the difference between the Obama approach and his predecessor’s. In truth, Obama’s probably right that he can afford to cool things a little, but the question remains: to what end?

The administration has certainly struggled to find alternative allies to take up the slack. The president has appealed to Europe for additional support in Afghanistan, for instance, but has made little progress with nations who see no vital interest in sending their troops to that region. There are tentative signs that Russia might be giving a little over Iran. But there has been little progress in Palestine so far, especially on the settlement issue. Speeches to the United Nations and the Muslim world, and overtures to Iran, have been generally welcome, but are more a question of changing the atmosphere than shifting the substance of US foreign policy. These may ultimately end up in a Nixonian triumph, whereby the exit strategy is built upon the reshaping of relations with wider regional power brokers. But this will not become clear for a good while, and it still takes two to tango. Moreover, this approach is sometimes difficult to mesh with a democracy-promotion strategy, especially given the complex and fractious politics in Iran, where efforts to seek rapprochement with Ahmedinejad and the revolutionary leadership will naturally strengthen them against the more pro-Western reformists.

Secondly, we have seen the administration, copied by the Brown government in the UK, trumpet nuclear arms reduction as part of a broader effort to get a new non-proliferation agreement on the table. Sounds good. But the problem is that nuclear decommissioning in the Anglo-American world is patently being driven by domestic budget concerns, and only secondarily by a desire to feed into arms control negotiations. This is best shown by the fact that Brown is making a big deal out of his offer to reduce the UK arsenal from four submarines to three, while simultaneously trying to neutralize nationalist opposition at home by pointing out that in practice this need not make any difference to the capacity of the Royal Navy to strike the enemy, or necessarily reduce the total number of warheads available for delivery. Obama has sought to square a similar circle, presenting the movement away from missile defence in Eastern Europe and toward a seaborne alternative as a way of defusing tensions with Russia, a way of saving money, and a more effective deterrent.

Right or wrong as a policy, this rhetoric doesn’t convince. Necessarily, the decision to reduce a nuclear deterrent is also a decision to increase a nation's vulnerability. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been a meaningful deterrent in the first place. As such, genuine reduction in deterrence must be accompanied by an increased reliance on ties of trust and mutual assistance between nations, positive incentives for cooperation to replace the negative incentive of mutual fear.

More importantly, no-one will be fooled by the rhetoric. Everyone will know this is about the exigencies of deficit reduction. And because of that, we can presumably expect these offers to produce comparatively weaker responses from other powers. The same thing happened in the 1980s when the dire financial straits of the Soviet Union allowed Reagan to insist upon a deal for arms reduction (the “zero option”) that was far more aggressive than most professional nuclear negotiators had ever considered possible.

At the same time, there is a worrying lack of clarity about Afghanistan. In recent weeks we have seen internal disagreements in the administration bubble out into the public, as supporters of McChrystal have leaked their demands for a major surge in troop numbers, and the White House responding by playing up a Biden plan that involves a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan and invokes memories of older, truly appalling suggestions by him to orchestrate a partition in Iraq. No-one can seriously believe that a Biden plan is on the table, but circulating the idea in the public domain is an attempt by the White House to assert ownership over the negotiations with the Joint Chiefs. It's the political equivalent of saying that the politicians, not the generals, will decide strategy in Afghanistan. It may do so, but it also points out that, in October 2009, there is still no clear strategy on the table.

To some extent, Obama is haunted by the ghost of Johnson, and has no wish to have his domestic agenda derailed by a war on the other side of the world. But he knows that a withdrawal which creates space for the Taliban to retake power would be even more disastrous for his chances of reelection. The most obvious third way is to try and shift the war onto Afghan shoulders, promoting local puppets, building up an army and leaving it to them to do the dying. This strategy has been applied in Iraq, not to mention dozens of places around the world during the Cold War. But the recent elections in Afghanistan have shown that US allies in Afghanistan are far from the perfect working partners one would like, making such a policy appear close to accepting that democracy is not a policy goal for the administration. Karzai’s need to knit together local warlords and power-brokers ultimately makes any kind of liberal regime virtually unimaginable under his rule. The pursuit of a Afghanization policy followed by a rapid withdrawal of US troops is most likely to produce a military dictatorship of some sort, as it has in most cases where this has been done in the past. Whether Obama can bear this kind of non-democratic solution may come to be the defining question of his foreign policy there.

Taken together, it is very hard to figure out exactly what the Obama administration is trying to achieve in its foreign policy, and in particular where the lines in the sand are. It seems to be driven as much by general instincts as specific calculations. Many of these big issues he’s plunging into will take time, and better that he is considered than foolhardy in his approach. We can't expect crises that have sometimes been decades in the making to all be sorted out in a matter of months. But sooner or later some tough choices are going to be inevitable. Until these arrive, many of us will be left scratching our heads.

Racism and logic

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:32:00 +0000

Ok, a quickie here as I had my racism argument quotient filled up with Henry Louis Gates earlier in the year. For the record, my view is that Republicans are perfectly able to get angry about Obama without it always being about race. Sometimes and for some people I imagine it is, sometimes it isn't. Life is complicated. The stuff about Obama's religion and birthplace seemed to offer fairly badly sublimated racial undertones. But we should remember that Republicans in the 1930s were quite happy to throw about accusations that President Roosevelt was a communist and a socialist and a dictator even though he was a patrician WASP. The state of South Carolina is a matter I'm not getting into here. But I found the confidence with which some people asserted that Joe Wilson's heckling was about race to be unsettling. I certainly can't believe Wilson would have been any more polite if a President Hillary Clinton had made the same speech. Presumably then it would have been sexism?

All that said, I've just seen a piece by Bruce Bartlett in the WSJ which frankly goes beyond my limited abilities to get to grips with. Bartlett criticizes Paul Krugman for arguing that "the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s." (Bartlett's paraphrase, but I've certainly seen Krugman, like many others, say such a thing.)

To challenge this argument, Bartlett provides 40 quotations from leading Democrats from Jefferson onwards, explicitly stating racist ideas. This, he argues, shows that the Democratic party "is far more culpable in promoting and defending racism" than the GOP. (This is taken from his book, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past.)

Ok, let's begin.

1. History to one side for a moment and let's start with logic. Does it follow that because party A is racist, party B is not? Clearly not. So the argument is a false dichotomy from the start. For most of America's history, both major parties were run by people who believed in the natural superiority of whites over blacks.

2. How exactly is the Democratic Party's past "buried"? I can't imagine there are many Americans out there who have any sense of their own history and don't know that the Democrats were the party of slavery and secession and the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and abolition. Surely that's US History 101?

3. The argument Bartlett attributes to Krugman, which I think is probably accepted by 99.99% of scholars, so can hardly be seen as Krugman's contribution to public debate, is that beginning with Goldwater and taking fruition with Nixon's Southern Strategy, the Republican party built a new majority in part (note: not entirely, but in part) by winning the old "Solid South" from the Democrats.

Frankly, I really don't think this is in much doubt. Simple election returns show that the Southern states who voted Dem until the civil rights movement decisively shifted to the Republicans afterward, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that a large part of the reason they switched was because of the civil rights movement. The big clue lay in the fact that so many of them at the time SAID SO.

So, fairly obviously, the Republicans inherited that old South and its prejudices. It's not Democrat voters who carry Confederate flags around today, is it? So, also fairly obviously, an attempt to stress the racism of Southern Democrats in the past reinforces attention upon the Republicans of today. If Bartlett wanted to argue that the South wasn't always motivated by race, that in the past white citizens councils and pro-slavery advocates were genuinely concerned about civic order, this could be used to show that, by extension, the modern Republican South wasn't racist. It'd be pretty implausible, but at least it would make sense.

But to say we need to pay attention to the Democrats' racist past naturally suggests that one should pay attention to the Republicans' racist present. Surely only a professional partisan could see it any other way?

If one was to make some kind of massive racistometer machine, whereby attitudes about racial difference were added cumulatively into a big pot for each party, then I daresay the Democrats would be the losers (or winners, depending on how the machine works, I suppose). The party has a terrible legacy. But to use this observation to make the claim that the virtually lilywhite Southern Republican party of 2009 is not a place where racists find a home, well it just defies logic.

Not for the first time, I'm bewildered.

The Onion: New Live Poll Allows Pundits to Pander to Viewers in Real Time

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:39:00 +0000

New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time

Old right and new right

doctoralexg@gmail.com (Alex) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:52:00 +0000

I've just read NYRB editor Sam Tanenhaus' new book, The Death of Conservatism. In many ways it's not very good; it's one of those tiny little overpriced hardbacks that (I assume) are fantastic moneyspinners for the author and publisher on a price to word ratio, written by individuals already able to trade on their name and reputation, but generally rushed together. The argument at times feels a little skewiffy, and the individual chapters still seem like the separate articles they were cobbled together from rather than parts of a whole.

But the essential point Tanenhaus is making is an important one: that even while it pays empty homage to the title, the brand of right wing politics governing the Republican party today has little to do with traditional conservatism. Tanenhaus provides a number of quotations that remind us just how far today's politicians and pundits have moved from their roots in the conservative resurgence in post-war America, and how far today's Republican values differ from those of their forefathers.

Whittaker Chambers: "A conservatism that will not accept [the rise of big government] ... is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy... Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms."

Irving Kristol: "the idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with a conservative political philosophy ... In our urbanized, industrialized, highly mobile society, people need governmental action of some kind if they are to cope with many of their problems: old age, illness, unemployment, etc. They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it."

George Will: "Conservatives rightly defend the market as a marvelous mechanism for allocating resources. But when conservatives begin regarding the market less as an expedient than as an ultimate value, or the ultimate arbiter of all values, their conservatism degenerates into the least conservative political impulse, which is populism."

Why has this happened? It's because the old form of conservatism, which many look back on with nostalgia in comparison to today's politics of invective, represented a patrician sort of politics. It thrived in a society where the people making decisions about running the country could come together in a single building and talk amongst themselves, and where the intellectuals' job was to fill up a few minds deeply rather than many minds shallowly. In this climate, consensus and nuance was not only possible, it was an essential mode of working.

Like it or not, the modern form of right wing politics is a more democratic form than traditional conservatism, formed from the expansion of the Midwestern populist wing of the Republican party and the old Democratic South and the new Southwest, precisely at the expense of the older patrician elites. It is democratic, that is, in the sense of representing a popular movement, rather than in the sense of respecting the principle of majority rule (since they probably represent about a third of the country and yet are basically unwilling to compromise with the other two thirds.)

The new right has risen to power since the 1960s because it was able to capture the Republican party from the old elites and because it could deliver victories in elections. And that, I suspect, is why we've not seen the last of it, either; and why calls to return to an older style of conservatism are on a hiding to nothing.