Matt Yglesias

My Life

Right, then. I’d been meaning to say something about this book. I think it’s best to really think of it as two books rolled into one. The first one, about Clinton’s days as a rising politico in Arkansas are quite good. The main limitation here is that it’s a book about Arkansas politics in the 1970s and 1980s which is not the most inherently fascinating topic in the world. Still, I’m interested in the question of where politicians who aren’t just leaping into the family business come from and how they get ahead, so I found this interesting. You get a lot of good memoirish stuff here about Clinton’s relationship with his sometimes allies, sometimes adversaries within Arkansas progressive politics — William Fulbright, Dale Bumpers, Dave Pryor, Jim Guy Tucker, etc. — along with things about his adversaries on the other side, and the friends and allies he made in other states.

The second book, about his presidency, is rather more disappointing. The Starr stuff is fine, as far as it goes, but if you want to read about this you should really read The Hunting of the President and if you’ve read Hunting you really don’t need to hear what Clinton has to say about it. The parts that deal with substantive policy and politics, on the other hand, are really quite disappointing. The trouble is that nothing gets explained, instead you just kind of have this blow-by-blow account of federal government related stuff that happened in the nineties. If you don’t know what stuff happened, you might learn a thing or two. Or else you might just get confused, I couldn’t really say. But if you’re looking to really learn anything about what Clinton thought — hoping to get an inside look at the process — which would seem to be the merits of a Clinton-authored memoir, you don’t get it. It’s just sort of “John said X, Jane said Y, so I did (X or Y) because (John or Jane) was right.” There’s no real account of what happened, arguments aren’t really put forward, etc. The fundamental flaw here is that whenever Clinton is talking about people who are still influential in left-of-center politics he wants to be uniformly nice about them.

One assumes that this is motivated by a desire to consolidate his position as an “elder statesman” in the Democratic Party and to avoid harming his wife’s political career. Those are both reasonable priorities, but the right way to deal with them would have been by not writing the memoir until such time as he felt ready to really tell us what he thinks. Instead everyone is his “close friend and frequent golfing partner” no on turns out to have been an idiot, an asshole, or just really brilliant at X but totally lacking understanding of Y. There’s no bitching and no moaning, which means that there’s no real praise of anyone either, because no one can stand out in the sea of banal niceties.

I would imagine that most presidential memoirs are like this, though I haven’t read any, but it makes for pretty disappointing reading. So far, then, Joe Klein’s The Natural is the best book about the Clinton years of which I’m aware, which is unfortunate, because I think a better, longer, more thorough book is needed. Maybe someday….

Hewitt and Armitage

Check out Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Deputy Secretary of State Dick Armitage . . . in an interesting way, Armitage seems to be pretty consistently taking less pro-administration stances than Hugh is.

Belton’s Dilemma

Patrick thinks he’s holding to the “pessimistic response,” but I find that what really gets people in those circumstances down is considering the possibility that they’re just kind of girly.

Unmasking

Julian Sanchez writes:

I’m always a little puzzled by a rhetorical strategy I occasionally encounter in friendly political arguments. I’ll often, unsurprisingly enough, end up taking a libertarian position, and midway through the back-and-forth, my interlocutor will respond with something like: “Well, you’re a libertarian, so of course you think that, but…” as if to suggest that an ideology is some kind of suspect ulterior motive, along the lines of “Well, you work for ADM, so of course you’re for ethanol subsidies.” But of course, that’s sort of backwards: I don’t believe in low taxes, strong property rights, free trade, and robust civil liberties because I’m a libertarian. Rather, I’m a libertarian because I believe all those things for other independent reasons. (And the “because” here is constitutive, not causal–being a libertarian, in other words, just means believing those other things.) It’s as though once you can slap a label on a view, you’ve banished it, in the way we used to think knowing the true magical names of evil spirits gave us power over them.

I think the best way to rationalize the use of this rhetorical device is to understand it as a means of located at what level of abstraction the debate is proceeding. You might have been assuming that you and your interlocutor had some shared premise, and you simply didn’t understand how he could fail to see that your conclusion followed from the premise in question. But then you realize that you’re disagreeing because he’s a libertarian and doesn’t agree with your background premise. You may then think that the dispute about the background premise isn’t really worth having and say, “well, you’re a libertarian, so of course that’s what you think” secure in the knowledge that you’re not missing some key step in the argument. Since any given casual conversation is probably not a good moment to decide that your entire ideology is wrong and you should be a libertarian, there’s really nothing more to say, and you walk away sure that you’re right.

The same kind of dynamic in reverse is why an article called “The Liberal Case Against The Minimum Wage” or “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage” or “The Libertarian Case for Universal Health Care” would be more interesting interesting than the converse ones. “The Libertarian Case Against The Minimum Wage” and “The Liberal Case for Universal Health Care” are both pretty banal, and probably cover well-ploughed territory. People who aren’t libertarians (in the first case) or liberals (in the second case) are going to feel that the author can just be ignored. He’s a liberal so of course he thinks there should be universal health care, but I’m not a liberal so why should I care what he thinks about this.

The difference here is that Julian seems to think that he’s come to various libertarian conclusions each on independent grounds and that it’s just a kind of coincidence that when you add all these conclusions up what you get is libertarianism. I think a more realistic picture of people’s political ideas (people who think a lot about political ideas, that is, other people probably have a very different belief structure) is that a small number of background beliefs about matters moral and empirical are driving their conclusions on various subjects. Correctly identifying those beliefs can be crucial in helping to understand what’s going on.

Transition Costs!

They must not teach math very well at Hillsdale College (“educating for liberty since 1844″) since 2003 graduate Keith Miller seems to think that 1 minus 1 equals 3. The fact that I’ve seen this precise op-ed published about 1 billion times makes me seriously question what’s going on in America’s conservative think tanks. It’s obvious — obvious! — that whatever merits Social Security privatization may have, the one thing it really won’t do is allow us to maintain the current benefit structure for oldish people past 2018 without raising taxes. Indeed, it would do the reverse.

The honest case here — obviously, again — is to say that in exchange for a one-time expenditure of tax revenues to float the system during the transitional period you could more-or-less permanently solve the problem. On the other hand, it’s really not clear that there even is a problem here, as the Social Security trustees are using what seems to be an improbably low projection of future productivity growth in their models. But if a problem does arise, it would be easy enough to cut the rate of benefit growth down to something less than the rate of wage growth but still higher than the rate of consumer price growth, or do any of half a dozen other things.

Debate Debate

In comments to this post Will Wilkinson notes that by “winning the debate” I mean “winning elections while having a debate about this” rather than “winning the debate on the merits.” I don’t know that the debate on the merits really can be won. It seems to me, it has always seemed to me, and it will always seem to me that the strong claims of ideological libertarianism (as opposed to the empirical observation that this or that government program might not be a good idea) are just patently and obviously absurd, though I know perfectly well that this view is held by many intelligent, though grossly immoral individuals. It strikes me as a tautology to say that coercion in the pursuit of the common good is justified, and, indeed, necessary, though as I say people disagree and I don’t know how one could possibly resolve such a disagreement. Hence we clash on the field of politics where the pro-coercion side deploys coercion (we’re pro-coercion, after all) and the anti-coercion side deploys dishonesty (since most people want what’s best for most people).

I recall a really good blank stare moments from back when I was in a seminar taught by Robert Nozick my junior year in college. Do you really believe that?

UPDATE II: Ah, I see Volokh has a reply on this point. I find it pretty unconvincing. Basically he says the outlandish hypothetical he outlines wouldn’t fall under the conditions laid out by the suspension clause. It seems to me, though, that if we’re going to bend the rules anywhere, it would be better to bend them here than to do the bending Volokh is contemplating. More broadly, absent “rebellion or invasion” or the threat of an imminent invasion it just doesn’t seem that you have the sort of compelling threat to the country that would warrant a setting aside of the normal rules of procedural justice. The constitution is not a suicide pack, but losing operational control over Falluja for a limited period of time isn’t suicide.

Run Amok

Lots of mockery among civil libertarians of this Eugene Volokh argument in re: the Gitmo detainees case, but I have a serious question. Doesn’t the constitution specifically contemplate that circumstances might arise under which the government can suspend the writ of habeas corpus as an emergency measure? If so, isn’t the right thing to say that if this sort of unlikely scenario were to emerge that congress could cross that bridge when we come to it through a suspension? It’s very hard to see how under the actually obtaining circumstances, or anything remotely resembling them, that the Court’s ruling will create a serious burden. That seems more than good enough to me.

UPDATE: See also Kieran Healy.

More Honesty Please

Andrew Sullivan and Gene Healy both denounce Hillary Clinton’s insidious plan to “take things away from you [a group of wealth people] on behalf of the common good.” And I’m glad they did it. If I may plug my column again this is a debate that liberals will win every day of the week. And it’s the debate we should be having — this is the real ideological divide in the country.

The Economy Is Stupid, Stupid

Today’s column — enjoy.

Weak

Andrew Sullivan’s ham-handed attack on William Raspberry’s defense of Fahrenheit 9-11 really makes Raspberry’s column (and, by extension, the film) seem a lot better than I felt like it was when I first saw it. We’re seeing here the confluence of both the very severe inherent flaws of the “fisking” genre and, apparently, a rightwing driven absolutely batty by the prospect of seeing their president get hit below the belt. Meanwhile the right threatens to establish a dictatorship if “responsible” voices on the left on the left don’t restrain Moore. Well now.

All Those Prisoners

I tried to read the detainee case decisions, but really the only one I could understand was Scalia’s dissent in Hamdi. That made a lot of sense to me. What I found most unsettling about the government’s position in these cases is that everything seemed mighty ad hoc like they didn’t have real reasons for treating Prisoner X like so and Prisoner Y like so. No real rules governed anything, and everyone was being shipped about in an arbitrary manner. The rulings don’t really seem to have altered that very much, since they were scattered, there was often no majority, and in a lot of instances the Court chose to duck the big issues. Now we’ve got more confusion than ever.

It’s nice to see, though, that they rejected the government’s far-too-cute position on the legal status of the Guantanamo Bay facility.

Summer in the Cities

Black man’s got a lot of problems
But he knows how to throw a brick.

Or so said Joe Strummer. Mark Schmitt thinks he may have forgotten, with the result that elites are no longer frightened into caring about urban poverty issues. Peter Levine in a related post calls me out as one of several prominent bloggers who ignores such topics. I’ll admit that I mostly let my topic selection simply be determined by the news cycle, so things that are off the national radar screen tend to drop off mine. I do post now and again on the topic of crime prevention, which I think bears some important relationships to the urban poverty issue. I also have a nagging, Atrios-esque sense that there’s something inherently futile in trying to have serious policy debates while George W. Bush is in the White House and the Republican Party is essentially devoid (outside of education, about which I promise to say more later) of people who are interested in substantive domestic policy debates.

More to the point, this is an issue area about which I have very little actual knowledge, but an extraordinarily large quantity of anecdote-based pseudo knowledge acquired from living for the past nine months in very close proximity to a lot of poor blacks and Latinos. This makes me very hesitant to opine on these topics because ont he one urban issue where I do have some knowledge (crime control) I know that anecdotes have wreaked horrible damage on public policy.

The Gas

Juan Cole makes an important point about the odd theory that the “real” motive for the Afghan War was a desire to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan: A pipeline to convey natural gas from Turkmenistan would be an excellent thing to have. Natural gas is something about which it’s hard to say too many good things, it’s a hell of a lot cleaner than coal or oil, it’s relatively cheap, it can be processed into electricity by very flexible generators, you can make hydrogen fuel out of it, and it has a lot of promise to serve as a “transitional fuel” as we start transitioning away from the oil/coal economy to a non-hydrocarbon one. The good people of Turkmenistan could use more money, as could the Afghans, and the nations of South and East Asia need more energy supplies.

The main trouble with this pipeline is that it hasn’t actually been built, and in light of continuing instability it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing it very soon.

Now the trouble with natural gas is that transporting it requires liquification to create the oddly named “liquified natural gas” (LNG) and the facilities where you can dock LNG ships, regassify the LNG, and then put it onto pipelines are expensive, ugly, and need to be on the coast, where property values are high and people don’t like to see big fuel-processing facilities get constructed. Right now our regas capacity isn’t very high, so it’s hard to import much LNG and natural gas production in the USA has already peaked even though it would be nice to use more. The current thinking is that we can build the facilities in Mexico and pipe it up from there.

Oh Canada!

Instead of shifting right as many were predicting yesterday, Canadian politics seems to have taken a left turn, at least functionally. The Liberals have a rather large plurality compared to the Conservatives (Ontario voters seem to have panicked at the last minute) but will need to rely on the votes of the left-wing New Democratic Party and the hopes of picking up a few social democratic Bloc Québécois members to get anything done.

Hawks After Hawkery

Via Laura Rozen who’s got some thoughts on this, a good Fox News piece on the Iranian threat. I suspect that the hawks’ efforts to push the panic button here are considerably more justified than their similar efforts vis-à-vis Iraq. The trouble is that they’ve already burned all the resources — troops, prepositioned munitions, international and domestic political credibility, sheer will — that they need in the Iraq venture.

It’s especially noteworthy that a large number of people who always (and, I would say in retrospect, correctly) believed that Iran was the greater strategic threat in the region managed to go along with the Iraq War either just for the hell of it, in order to maintain their general credibility as “hawks,” or else out of a misguided sense that invading Iraq would wind up weaken Iran. In fact, the reverse seems to have happened, as the war strengthened the hand of hardliners at home, weakened the US military threat, and created a new playpen for possible Iranian influence.

The upshot may be that there’s not really a great deal to be done. We’ve seen this tragicomedy play out in North Korea already, and if Iran is next, we’ll be spending the next several decades paying the price for our little misadventure in the Gulf.

Blogads

Having some trouble with the blogads.

Fafblog Veepstakes

Funny stuff, but one ought to speak no ill of John Edwards as long as the specter of Gephardtism is still stalking the land. The latter gentleman’s candidacy is being considered very seriously, and it is incumbent on all decent people to help squash it.

John Rawls: Self-Promoting Hack?

Chris Bertram put up what I think is a rather churlish post about this thing I wrote that’s produced some interesting discussion in the comments section.

And Another Thing

Of course, the other thing to be said about Canada is that no matter how rightwing Stephen Harper may be, no one would be crazy enough to bestow upon their country the American health care system. His ideas may or may not constitute an improvement over the Canadian status quo (haven’t examined the question) but they’d still certainly produce a better outcome than America’s “worst of both worlds” approach to health care.

Ill-served

Obligatory haven’t-seen-the-movie-yet-going-tommorrow-night disclaimer. That said, I think my friend Richard Just flies a bit off the handle with this assertion:

There seems to be a growing sentiment among liberals that Moore is a bad guy, but dammit, he’s our bad guy. I disagree. Liberalism is as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty.

I’m not sure I’d want to be a forthright defender of intellectual dishonesty, but liberalism can’t possibly be as badly served by liberal intellectual dishonesty as it is by conservative intellectual dishonesty. At least it can’t be if we’re talking about effective intellectually dishonest material. And Moore’s film seems to be effective — it’s doing just what a sermon aimed at the choir is supposed to do: firing people up and motivating them to get involved in the process.

I should say more broadly, though, that the folks complaining about the film really sort of seem to be complaining about the fact that it’s a film. I take it for granted that Moore’s argument doesn’t really make sense, but that’s because it’s a movie. When you’re writing, you can lay out an argument where you clearly say what you’re trying to say and then you mount some evidence. A movie, by its very nature, is appealing to people on a sub-rational level by using images and sounds to try and manipulate your emotions. As a result, it’s not very well-suited to high-toned discourse about the leading issues of the day. But that’s just the nature of the beast. Film does have certain political uses, namely as a motivating tool. It’s one thing to hear about what the president did after being told of the second plane, and it’s another thing to see it. Images, sound, film hit you in the gut in a way that text doesn’t. Text, on the other hand, lends itself to making real, credible arguments in a way that film doesn’t.

Now last time I saw text by Moore, Dude, Where’s My Country? it was pretty unimpressive compared to other Bush-bashing books, but that’s why Moore’s really a film-maker.