Just So You Know

Everything I post here shows up first at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, where I blog regularly.

You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?

Note: This was a shitty movie.

So, if Memeorandum is any indication, a few conservative bloggers have taken to mining fourth-rate dialogue from third-rate science fiction movies in order to make an absurd point about how a modest package of insurance reforms amounts to an attack on liberty itself.

I asked something along these lines on Facebook yesterday and in light of the apoplectic conservative reaction to Saturday’s vote, it’s worth posing these questions to the linked bloggers (if they are paying attention, of course). In what way does the health care bill constitute “socialism” or an attack on our “liberty”? How does the contents of the bill limit your freedom of action or restrict your ability to pursue your own comprehensive conception of the good? And, assuming you’re not similarly opposed to Medicare and Social Security, how is the health care bill categorically different from either of those programs? Finally, I also think it’s worth asking if you have a solution. If agree that there are serious systemic problems with our health care system, then are there any reforms you think would address – or at least mitigate – the problems of overconsumption, high cost, and inadequate coverage?

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that neither blogger has a real answer to any of those questions. For all of their bleating about how Saturday’s vote dealt a Mortal Kombat-esque fatal blow to “liberty,” I doubt either blogger even has a reasonably well-thought idea of what liberty is. Indeed, I think it’s entirely fair to say that “liberty” for these folks is anything they really like and tyranny, by contrast, is anything that makes them feel sad and/or knocks them off of their (poorly) self-constructed pedestal.

Also, what John Cole said.

Protecting American values from extremists

I agree with conservatives like David Horowitz and John Hinderacker; in light of the shooting at Ft. Hood, we need to reassert and protect our values. The question of course, is the who we’re protecting our values from. Hint: it’s not Muslims. But first, a few quick points about Muslim-American attitudes:

1. Muslim-American are overwhelmingly happy with their place in the United States:

Back in 2007, the Pew Research Center released the first comprehensive survey of Muslim-American attitudes. According to the survey, nearly eight out of ten Muslim-Americans say that they are happy with their lives in the United States. To break that down a bit, 24 percent of Muslim Americans would say that they are “very happy” with their lives, 54 percent would say that they are “pretty happy,” and only 18 percent would say “not too happy.” Among the general public, those numbers are 36 percent, 51 percent and 12 percent respectively. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Most Muslim-Americans see no conflict between religious commitment and living in a modern society:

63 percent of Muslim-Americans say that they see no conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society. What’s more, a strong plurality of Muslims (43 percent) say that Muslims coming to America today should adopt American customs. By contrast, only 26 percent say that they should remain distinct, and 16 percent say that they should try both. Indeed, reading through the report, the vast majority of data suggests that on the whole, Muslims are glad to be in the United States and happy with the opportunities the country provides them.

Unfortunately, a good majority of Muslims are also worried about various forms of discrimination, racism, prejudice and stereotyping. 19 percent of Muslims say that they are worried about discrimination/racism/prejudice, 15 percent are worried about being viewed as terrorists, 14 percent are worried about ignorance of Islam, and 12 percent are worried about stereotyping.

This is a really important point. Contra the Hinderaker’s and Horowitz’s, we have absolutely nothing to fear from the 2.5 million Muslims who call the United States home. It’s to our credit as Americans that we have built a society where people of different religious beliefs and cultural traditions can live and work in peace without fear of harassment. Insofar that we should worry about anything, it’s those who would ostracize Muslims and use the weight of the federal government to isolate them. Anger and hostility breed hatred and extremism, and if we want to remain a society committed to tolerance and mutual respect, then we should work our hardest to marginalize anti-Muslim voices.

Because, as we all know, Military Spending Doesn’t Count

New York Times:

The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged to end the Bush administration practice of paying for the conflicts with so-called supplemental funds that are outside the normal Defense Department budget.

The financing would be on top of the $130 billion that Congress authorized for the wars just last month.

And that financing would be on top of the $680 billion defense bill Congress authorized a few days ago.

If you’ve been reading my output with any regularity, you’ll know that there are few things that piss me off more than bloated defense budgets. And so in the interest of sparing you another tirade against inflated defense spending, here is Ryan Avent, who wonders if there are better ways to spend $680 billion:

What if? Well, this year, that would mean devoting $680 billion to investments in infrastructure. That’s more than $200 billion more than Oberstar’s entire proposed transportation reauthorization bill, which was itself a large increase over the previous transportation law. There’s probably no way we could spend all that money at once, but it would nicely capitalize an infrastructure bank, and the promise of a steady flow of funds would get states thinking about real, long-term investments.

With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures? Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense? Have a look at this if you’re unsure.

And while the gains to new investments in infrastructure (and not just in transportation) would be large, it isn’t as though we lack critical needs. What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense. Aimless defense spending, on the other hand, may well make us poorer and less secure.

I would also add that we could probably have a rational conversation about national priorities if we talked about defense spending in the same way that we talked about health care spending. That is, if all defense projects were scored according to their ten year cost, or if economists scrutinized the distortionary impact of massive defense spending, or if new defense spending had to be accounted for through tax increases or cuts in other spending, then we probably wouldn’t be so quick to perpetuate these out of control budgets. As it stands however, defense spending is magical spending, and as such, doesn’t actually have any impact on anything ever.

Also, I really want a pony.

links for 2009-11-05

• Title IX Dad | The American Prospect
  If we were transported back to 1972, some of us might worry that schoolchildren and their parents weren't ready for such an abrupt transformation as Title IX. Most people "accepted baseball as a male prerogative of some sort," complained a Little League vice president in 1974.

  But as I watch my daughter do something that would have been unlikely for a girl of my generation, and see all that goes with it, I'm endlessly thankful to those litigators and legislators of the early 1970s who weren't at all afraid to give the culture and its assumptions a shove in the name of fairness. And so should my daughter be. Although for now, it's more exciting that last spring her coach declared her the team's Most Valuable Catcher.

  (tags: politics feminism)
• David Leonhardt – What if the Economy Actually is Getting Better?
  As a congenital optimist, I tend to see things this way too. But one has to admit there's an element of faith involved. Plus, Mr. Micawber spent an awful lot of time in debtor's prison, and things didn't really turn up for him until he moved to Australia.

  Also, even if you buy the Leonhardt/Micawber/Fox forecast, we still have to make it to 2011. I get the feeling there will be so many economic crosscurrents and counterforces as to make the recovery seem awfully dubious for most of 2010. Still, something will turn up. Just can't tell you when.

  (tags: economy)
• How Gay Marriage Lost In Maine | Pine Tree Politics
  "Mainers, and national observers, have woken up this morning asking how the Yes on 1 coalition won this fight. Through most of the lead up to this vote, observers (including myself) felt that it would be extremely close, potentially to a recount, and that the No on 1 folks had the early advantage.

  True, most of us were careful to couch our predictions with additional analysis that left the door open for a Yes on 1 victory, but I don’t think anyone really saw a more than 30,000 vote victory for the proponents of the veto. And make no mistake – this was a decisive, and unquestionable win for the Yes on 1 campaign. It wasn’t really very close."

  (tags: maine marriage election)

Survey Says: 49% of Americans Don’t Much Like Homosexuality

This exchange between Rod Dreher and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the basis of opposition to same-sex marriage is interesting, if only because it provides another striking example of how ones identity has an incredible impact on how one views the world and other human beings.  That is, it’s pretty easy to believe that bigotry drives political action against same-sex marriage when you yourself belong to a minority group that was a regular target of disenfranchisement (or worse) for more than a century.  That said, while I see where Dreher is coming from, if Pew has their numbers right, the data is firmly on Ta-Nehisi’s side:

49 percent of Americans believe that homosexuality is “morally wrong,” while only 9 percent view it as morally acceptable.  35 percent say that homosexuality isn’t a moral issue at all, and 7 percent say that it depends (and I’m not sure what that means, at all).  Broken down by age, the numbers tell a familiar story: a solid majority of Americans 50 and older view homosexuality as morally wrong (about 53 percent), whereas only 38 percent of the 29 and younger crowd feels similarly.  Surprisingly (to me at least) a slight majority – 51 percent – of Americans aged 30-49 view homosexuality as morally wrong.  Though if disaggregated, the number of people who disapprove of homosexuality might be greater at the end of the age distribution.

If there’s any takeaway from this, it’s that we really should stop underestimating the extent to which raw prejudice drives political decisions.  As Freddie remarked on Twitter recently:

It has become impolite to say so, in either direction, but never doubt many in this country hate and fear gay people.

The corollary to this, of course, is that in a country where a near-majority is morally opposed to homosexuality, it is ridiculous (and almost cruel) to expect gay people to rely exclusively on legislatures as they fight to secure their rights as American citizens.  And that’s especially the case when you realize that when legislative efforts are successful, there is almost always an immediate effort to rescind or overturn the legislation.  The simple fact is that if current demographic trends hold true, a majority of Americans will eventually support marriage equality.  In the meantime though, I think LGBT activist groups should take a page from the Civil Rights Movement and again begin focusing their challenges on the courts.  It simply doesn’t make any sense to rely on the generosity of the majority (indeed, if black people did, segregation would have lasted for a whole lot longer).

Note: The only reason why this isn’t up at the League first is because of technical difficulties. You should still remember to check the League for new posts.

A brief aside on yesterday’s election in Virginia

I live in Virginia (albeit one of the commonwealth’s few liberal strongholds*) and got my start in the blogosphere as a Virginia politics blogger, so if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to indulge my roots a little with a quick post on yesterday’s election.  As far as I can tell, the conventional wisdom about yesterday’s election is that it represents a “shot across the bow” from independent voters worried about heavy spending and deficits.  The election wasn’t a referendum on President Obama’s performance, but it was a sign that independents are increasingly uneasy with the liberal direction the country is taking.

As you can probably guess, I think this is complete bunk.  For starters, self-described “independent” voters are often anything but; when pressed by pollsters, most independents will admit to leaning in one direction or another.  In Virginia, it seems that most independents lean to the right - a poll from this summer suggests that the vast majority of independents identify as either moderate or conservative.  If you were to ask independents who voted in yesterday’s election whether or not they supported John McCain in last year’s election, I’m fairly confident that a solid majority would say that they did.  In fact, if you were to ask yesterday’s voters whether they supported John McCain, a majority would say yes – 51 percent, in fact.  The problem for pundits trying to argue that the election was indicative of a broader national trend is that those who turned out to vote were older, whiter and more conservative than the average voter, and certainly the average Obama voter.  Here’s a quick graph I made using the exit poll data:

The vast majority of the electorate was older and white, the overwhelming majority of whom supported McDonnell: 67 percent of all white voters went for McDonnell, and the total is similar for voters aged 45 and older.  What’s more, 34 percent of total voters were white Republicans and 25 percent were white Independents, the vast majority of whom supported McDonnell.

To keep this analysis short, insofar that this election is indicative of anything it’s of stuff we already know: that the majority of voters in off-year elections are old, white and conservative, and conservatives are super-energized.  I doubt that even a super-competent campaign could have turned out enough young and minority voters to help Creigh Deeds overcome this kind of demographic disadvantage.

* The People’s Republic of Charlottesville

Two Quick Responses

At the risk of sounding overly nitpicky, I think E.D. is being a little imprecise when he attributes minority voting preferences to simple “populism”:

I think a lot of minority voters aren’t so much “progressive” as they are in favor of more direct government assistance, something Democrats have promised to do better than Republicans.  A lot of minorities and union members also happen to be staunch social conservatives.  Support for things like gay marriage is very low among black and Hispanic populations.  Union members and minorities just have populist tendencies when it comes to economics.

Two things: first, E.D. is underestimating the extent to which minorities (and particularly African-Americans) have a fairly strong ideological commitment to an activist federal government.

At least in the post-war era, the federal government has played a critical role in advancing and protecting the civil and economic rights of racial minorities. Not surprisingly, at least among African-Americans, this has had a pretty significant impact on black political thought.  Generally speaking, African-Americans take a positive view of the federal government, and as Reihan pointed out in our podcast, this makes them more likely to find some form of liberalism salient.  It’s also worth noting that insofar that African-Americans/minorities more generally are socially conservative, the focus isn’t really on gay marriage or abortion (which is what E.D. seems to be suggesting) as much as it is on family stability and community development, which has a different set of political implications.

The other piece is that E.D. is definitely underestimating the extent to which respect has a significant impact on minority voting.  Simply put, even if Democratic policies had a negligible effect on the material well-being of minority voters, I still think that you would see large-scale minority support for the Democratic Party, if only because Democrats are the party that takes minority concerns seriously.  More often than not, Republicans are either dismissive of or actively hostile to minority interests.  With that kind of record – and a relatively friendly Democratic Party – it really shouldn’t come as any surprise that minorities are reliable Democratic voters.

We Are Experiencing Institutional Difficulties

At least among liberal bloggers, it’s become a matter of conventional wisdom that Congress – and particularly the Senate – is fundamentally broken.  Matthew Yglesias regularly points out our system’s absurdities, and various commentatorshave written very smart posts about our system’s complete inability to adequately address long-term challenges.

Here at the League, Mark Thompson has written a great post detailing both a serious problem with our institutional arrangement and its potential solution.  I’m not going to do much block-quoting (though I recommend reading the whole thing), but it suffices to say that Mark wants to make the presidency and Congress more accountable for their failures.  That is, as it stands, even though legislation originates in and is written by Congress, the outsized role of the presidency means that in the public eye, it’s the president who is to blame for failed or ineffective legislation, even if the prerogative lies with the legislature.  Mark’s solution then, is to nationalize elections for the Speaker of the House, in hopes that having a nationally recognized leader of the House would focus criticism where it rightly belongs.  Here’s Mark in his own words:

The most obvious reason why this proposal would greatly reduce regulatory capture and the growth of Executive Power is that it would give voters someone to hold accountable specifically for the passage of legislation. Under our current system, narrow local interests are able to turn national legislation into little more than a giant rent-seeking operation, while the scope of the legislation becomes severely watered down. There is no one to hold accountable for this – if your district gets none of the rent-seeking, you have to be content with “well, it’s better than nothing,” or “well, at least my Congresslizard voted against it.”

Mark’s diagnosis focuses on the problem of accountability and I understand why: as long as its virtually impossible to hold Congress responsible for its failures, we will continue to play this silly game where we pretend that electing a new president will have some measurable effect on Congress’ ability to pass actual legislation, rather than the thinly veiled-giveaways to corporate or parochial interests that passes for legislation.  That said, I’m not sure if increased accountability – through Mark’s solution or any other – should be our first concern.  Before we try to steer Congress towards greater accountability, I think we should first attempt to steer Congress towards greater responsiveness.  That potentially far-reaching legislation is nearly always tamed and de-fanged is partially (or even mostly) a product of the huge number of veto points that exist within our system, including extra-constitutional requirements like the filibuster.

I’ve argued this before and it’s worth restating here: in the absence of a tremendous amount of consensus, any given bill needs to appease a huge number of stakeholders in order for it to become law.  For small bills this isn’t a huge problem, as the stakes aren’t terribly high.  But for something like health care reform (or soon enough, emissions reduction), it becomes a nearly insurmountable obstacle.  Beginning at the committee level, hostile (or even merely self-interested) legislators can demand concessions which, more often than not, weaken the legislation rather than strengthen it.  As the bill ascends through Congress, it runs into more and more of these potential veto points and each point, it becomes weaker and weaker, until it has little consequence and bears little resemblance to its original form.

The broader problem, of course, is that this has an incredible distortionary effect on policy-making.  Lately, quite a few conservative reformers (like our own E.D. Kain) have lambasted Democrats for not supporting measures like Wyden-Bennet in health care (which would have actually restructured the health care system, for the better) or a straightforward carbon tax as a means to reduce emissions.  What each of them miss, I think, is the fact that legislators “enter the game” aware of the veto points that exist, the concessions they have to make, and the incredibly divisive political moment we live in.  They are aware that our system requires a base-level of ideological consensus in order for meaningful legislation to make its way through, and in the absence of that consensus they craft legislation to be as inoffensive as possible, in order to up the chance that their bill will reach the end of the process intact (rather than a pale, hollow shell of itself).  In the real world, what this means is that even if legislators know of a better, simpler policy – like the carbon tax – there is no incentive to pursue it, because there isn’t enough consensus to overcome the institutional barriers in place.  The only alternative is to bribe each of the gatekeepers, in hopes that they’ll let you pass through unmolested.

Accountability is nice, but absent further institutional reform, it still leaves you with that basic problem (albeit slightly reduced).  Better would be to reduce or eliminate some of those barriers, as to make better legislation possible in the first place.  A system where committees are weaker, majorities are stronger and obstructionism harder is a system that incentivizes better legislation, as each member knows that their bill can make it to the floor in more or less its original state.  It’s a system where there are fewer opportunities for capture by special or parochial interests, and it’s a system that actually empowers presidents to pursue their agendas.  If then we need to nationalize Speaker elections, then let’s do it.  But like I said, before any of that, let’s make sure that we have a system that can actually work.

Stuff White People Americans Do

Over at Stuff White People Do, Nikki has a great guest post explaining one of the tactics (some) white people use to justify or explain their opposition to affirmative action and other forms of “reverse racism”:

Usually when I hear these sorts of lines from white people, they are offered in explanation of why they vehemently oppose affirmative action, or any other race-based help/“handouts” for people of color. Their justification, in most cases, is this insistence on their own helplessness to change history, and their unwillingness to “pay” or be “held responsible” for it.

The way they tell it, they, too, are victims of unjust, ignorant, and/or racist white ancestors — because they, white Americans living today, are the unfortunate ones who must deal with affirmative action, “reverse racism,” and angry, greedy people of color. Sure, black people suffered tremendously under slavery, but many white people now feel that they are the oppressed ones, paying unfairly for “the sins of the fathers.”

[...]

We reap what others have sown before us, and that includes deep mistrust, prejudice, and racism. And wedo bear the burden, as their descendants — and the only people with the power to change anything now — to try to right at least some of the wrongs. It’s time to challenge all the people of our generation who want to simply wash their hands of history. Why should we expect to be excused from addressing this injustice, and working to eradicate it, even if we are not the ones “directly responsible” for it?

This is of course all speculation, but something tells me that part of the reason why Americans have such a problem dealing with the past is that it flies in the face of our belief in the ability of an individual, a community or a nation to reinvent itself.  As a general matter, Americans don’t like to believe that we are just as weighted down and just as captured by the past as everyone else.  The past is there, yes, but it’s something to honored or disregarded, not dwelled upon.

The simple act of acknowledging institutional racism requires an explicit rejection of that idea.  Indeed, we’re no longer allowed to avoid the injustices of the past — not only do we have to pay attention to the actions of our forefathers, but we also are required to recognize that our forefathers still have enduring influence over the shape of our society.  The only way to really understand – and thus work against – institutional racism then is to dwell on the stories and tragedies of the past and really grapple with our history of racism and apartheid. Then-candidate Obama tried to say as much in his “race” speech last year, but I’m not sure if it actually resonated, beyond the fact that everyone was impressed with his not-really-that-impressive use of a Faulkner quote (admittedly one that holds a lot of resonance for this conversation).

Update: Edited for clarity and quality.