Category Archives: Marketplace of ideas

An economic argument for supporting Israel

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For years, Samuel Tenenbaum has tried to turn the attention of economic development types in SC toward Israel. This is understandable, given that Samuel is the father of our state’s endowed chairs program, and Israel’s tech prowess.

But I hadn’t seen the same argument presented in strategic terms until I read this piece this morning:

America’s enemies understand deeply and intuitively that no U.S. goals or resources in the Middle East are remotely as important as Israel. Why don’t we?

Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package. It is steadily increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies. It is the global master of microchip design, network algorithms and medical instruments…

While it wasn’t the main point of the piece, I also was struck by what a neat summation, from the pro-Israel perspective, this was of why the peace process hasn’t worked in recent years:

Actions have consequences. When the Palestinian Liberation Organization launched two murderous Intifadas within a little over a decade, responded to withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza by launching thousands of rockets on Israeli towns, spurned every sacrificial offer of “Land for Peace” from Oslo through Camp David, and reversed the huge economic gains fostered in the Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1990, the die was cast…

Not the whole story. But neither is blaming Israel.

There are more of US than there are of Democrats or Republicans

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First, take a look at the awesome image that combine Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan into one face, and the one that does the same with Kennedy and Nixon. Cool. There was another that did the same with Obama and Bush, but I can’t seem to locate it as a still image online — oh, there it is.

I got excited when I saw those, and thought the piece, headlined “Death of the Duopoly,” would be a sort of UnParty manifesto. But no. When  I want an Unparty Manifesto, I have to write it myself.

Unfortunately, this was one of those pieces that saw the WSJ’s sort of libertarianism as the natural successor to the two parties, going on about how the American people, in their supposed wisdom, are turned against the drug war, and toward paying people to abandon public schools. Ho-hum, the usual. Nothing paradigm-breaking at all.

But the pictures were cool. And while the author of this piece may be confused as to the implications, these data were at least confusing:

Perhaps the most important long-term trend in U.S. politics is the four-decade leak in market share by the country’s two dominant parties. In 1970, the Harris Poll asked Americans, “Regardless of how you may vote, what do you usually consider yourself—a Republican, a Democrat, an independent or some other party?”

Fully 49% of respondents chose Democrat, and 31% called themselves Republicans. Those figures are now 35% for Democrats and 28% for Republicans. While the numbers have fluctuated over the years, the only real growth market in politics is voters who decline affiliation, with independents increasing from 20% of respondents to 28%.

These findings are consistent with other surveys. In January, Gallup reported that the Democrats were near their lowest point in 22 years (31%), while the GOP remained stuck below the one-third mark at 29%. The affiliation with the highest marks? Independent, at 38% and growing. In a survey released in May, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of independents rose from 29% in 2000 to 37% in 2011…

Yes, there are now more of us than there are of either Democrats or Republicans (at least, according to Gallup and apparently Pew). Maybe when we grow to exceed all the partisans combined, we’ll get somewhere. But at least we’re on our way.

Are we starting to see a geologic shift between left and right on national security?

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This is something I’ve been thinking about the last few days, and I haven’t written about it because it’s complicated and I haven’t had time to do something pulling all the threads together. But when I saw this development, I decided I’d better go ahead and throw out the general idea and get the discussion started:

Obama Says War Powers Act Doesn’t Apply to Libya Mission

White House maintains that the president doesn’t need lawmakers’ permission for U.S. role in NATO-led effort.

The White House on Wednesday told skeptical lawmakers that President Obama doesn’t need their permission to continue the nation’s involvement in the NATO-led mission in Libya because U.S. forces are playing only a supporting role there.

Administration lawyers made their case as part of a larger report sent to Congress responding to complaints that the president had yet to provide a sufficient rationale for continuing the Libya campaign, the New York Times reports.

“We are not saying the president can take the country into war on his own,” State Department lawyer Harold Koh told the paper. “We are not saying the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional or should be scrapped, or that we can refuse to consult Congress. We are saying the limited nature of this particular mission is not the kind of ‘hostilities’ envisioned by the War Powers Resolution.”…

OK, digest that. Here’s the NYT version, and here’s the WashPost. And then consider some of the other things I’ve been noticing lately:

  • The fact that, in the GOP debate the other night, we heard some Republicans moving more toward the “get out of Afghanistan ASAP” line. Ron Paul, treated as an outcast for saying such things four years ago, got cheered by the Fox News crowd.
  • The bold way Obama decided to go in and GET bin Laden, without any of that multilateral consult-the-allies (as in, tell the Pakistanis we’re attacking in the heart of their country) touchy-feely stuff. No fooling around.
  • The way the administration is playing on having stunned the world with the bin Laden thing to get its way elsewhere. That prompted me to write that the difference between Bush and Obama is that Bush was Sonny, while Obama is the far-deadlier (that is, more effective) Michael.
  • The way Obama is taking advantage of chaos in Yemen to just GO AFTER terrorists there, without asking Congress or the UN, or presenting arguments about the War Powers Act, or anything like that. Read this, and this.

This has been building ever since the election, with a lot of Obama’s antiwar base feeling pretty disoriented (wait — is this who we elected?), and people like me being reassured by his steady pragmatism.

But lately, the process has seemed to be accelerating. Obama still talks a good war-as-last-resort, multilateral, we-don’t-want-to-be-a-bully line for the base… but watch what happens. (And how about the way he threw everybody off-balance on Libya, letting the FRENCH of all people take the lead, while still managing to get in there and go after the bad guys? That enabled him to have it both ways. The allies couldn’t do it without us, but it came across looking like we were a reluctant junior partner, which bought Obama some support for the move among liberals.)

And I find myself wondering, is anyone else noticing? I mean, while the Republicans get more timid about the U.S. role abroad (in some ways) and obsess more and more about domestic issues (because that’s what the Tea Party cares about), Obama is out there going all JFK and LBJ. He’s going Old School. He’s defining Democratic presidential leadership back to where it was before Vietnam.

Are the parties moving toward switching places?

This is a fascinating development. I think it has the potential to completely realign the country politically, and on more than national security.

Anybody else noticing this?

Could it (finally) be over for Grover Norquist?

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Who’da thunk the day would ever come?

Mark Sanford buddy and guru Grover Norquist — whose anti-tax pledge has verged on paralyzing South Carolina government in recent years because he had so many GOP lawmakers signing it and afraid to cross him (thereby preventing comprehensive tax reform, among other things) has apparently miscalculated, leading to a very public rebuke, by Republicans, in the age of the Tea Party:

WASHINGTON — Grover Norquist’s grip on the Republican Party’s tax policy slipped dramatically on Tuesday, a development that is likely to have significant repercussions on the debate over spending, revenue and the federal deficit.

Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform and a leading party power broker for a generation, drew a hard line in the sand against repealing ethanol subsidies, arguing that ending the tax breaks is equivalent to a tax increase and therefore a violation of The Pledge — a document nearly every Republican has signed promising never to vote to raise taxes.

Thirty-four Senate Republicans walked nonchalantly across that line on Tuesday, voting to move forward on an amendment sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that would repeal the subsidies.

Norquist has been vicious in his recent talks on Coburn, charging that his amendment means he “lied his way into office” and is breaking the pledge.

Coburn was unmoved. “I think you all think he has a whole lot more hold than I think he has,” Coburn told reporters before the vote. “I don’t disagree with him on a lot of principles. The fact is it’s not a good position to put yourself in when you say, ‘Here’s a tax expenditure that nobody needs, and yet we have to give somebody else a tax cut to take away this.'”…

Could this be the end?

I mean, it should be. Even if you agree with Norquist, for the guy who famously wanted to shrink government to where he could drown it in a bathtub to make his stand on KEEPING one of the more wasteful government boondoggles is not calculated to win credibility.

What is marriage? (Hint: It’s not what Ron Paul thinks it is)

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One of the more foolish things said in that debate last night was said by Ron Paul and I responded thusly:

Paul: “Get the government out” of marriage? What? What? What does he think marriage is? A secret agreement between 2 people? It’s a CONTRACT!

(Are you proud of me that I went with the more traditional “What? What?” rather than resorting to “WTF?” I am.)

To elaborate — and I fear I must elaborate, because for whatever reason this seems counterintuitive to a lot of folks — it is instructive to think for a few minutes about why we have marriage. Yeah, I get what Ron Paul thinks — that it’s some sort of private and/or religious thing. And yes, for us Catholics, it is indeed a sacrament.

But we had marriage long before there were Catholics. We had it before the Hebrews discovered monotheism. We had something like it, anyway, if it involved no more than jumping over a stick, or living together openly in the eyes of the whole community (thereby inviting its censure or assent). Because when humans are gathered into tribes or clans or whatever, it’s an important institution. It has to do with the fact that human offspring are so difficult to raise from the time they are born — no clinging to the mother from birth while she goes about her business the way apes do.

It is in society’s interest to have the male responsible be bound in some way to the female he impregnated. Yep, we’re still struggling to accomplish that today. (And much of the social dysfunction we struggle with today arises from our failure to get it right, as a society. Which only underlines the stakes in continuing to try to get it right.) But bottom line, that is the legitimate motivation of the full society in having such an institution. It gives the whole village somebody to yell at when there are all these kids underfoot: “Hey, you! Can’t you control your kids?” The village was wise to come up with this practice, to protect itself. And then, gradually, to develop the idea that it’s wisest to keep males and females apart, or turn hoses on them or something, until you have arrived at this society-protecting contract. (Something we’ve sort of forgotten in the past generation, but some in the more culturally conservative halls of academia are rediscovering it.)

So we started the institution, and developed all sorts of rules and regulations and codicils and rituals around it, such as the rehearsal dinner, and bridezillas. In a time when there was no notion of separation of religion and civil authority, it was perfectly natural that religious rituals and practices would become intertwined with the civil expectations and obligations. We should not, as a result of that, make the mistake of thinking it is “merely” a religious arrangement.

Of course, as well as “What does he think marriage is?” I could ask “What does he think government is?” Well, it’s nothing if it’s not simply the arrangements we come up with among ourselves for living together in a crowded society. I realize that libertarians think it’s some THING “out there” that’s menacing them, but it’s just us. Particularly in this country, the one with the longest-running experiment in self-government, it’s just us.

Anyway, to recap: We have marriage because long, long ago, it was noticed that if you left a man and a woman alone together, there was a tendency to have all these kids running around in short order. Primitive societies realized they needed to mitigate the potential ill effects of that explosive situation, and invented marriage. Put another way, we don’t have marriage for the couple, or for their priest or whatever. We have it for the kids, and the village they have to grow up in.

Talk about being Ms. Bossypants…

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One of the women in my household took it back to the library, so I didn’t get far enough in Tina Fey’s Bossypants to find out what happened after she hit puberty, but that’s cool. The part I did read was pretty funny.

What is not funny is the Gov. Bossypants we have over at the State House, who did this today:

Gov. Nikki Haley ordered lawmakers back to Columbia next week after they failed to pass a key piece of her legislative agenda on the legislative session’s last day, sparking dissention among legislative Republicans and howls from Democrats.

Haley wants lawmakers to return at 10 a.m. Tuesday to consider bills creating a Department of Administration, allowing the governor and lieutenant governor to run as a ticket, allow the governor to appoint the secretary of education and a bill merging the Department of Probation, Pardon and Parole into the Department of Corrections.

“Pick any two,” Haley said, asking lawmakers to voluntarily forfeit the $250 daily pay they are due, a total of $42,500 a day….

In other words, Do my will, and don’t get paid for doing it.

What a supreme mix of autocratic egoism and faux populism. The perfect Tea Party mix, steeped so as to make the maximum Palin-style impression.

Of course, she did allow them to pick two out of four, which I suppose Her Bossiness would consider to be magnanimity.

Here’s the problem with that: I would gladly vote for three out of the four (if her Bossiness could deign to condescend to do so, I would, were I a lawmaker, have to ask her to explain the virtues of combining the D of PP&P with Corrections). You know why? Because I am one of South Carolina’s most monotonously persistent advocates of giving the executive branch the ability to effectively administer the executive branch and be accountable for it.

But this kind of presumption of dictating to the legislative branch plays straight into the hands of those lawmakers who want to mischaracterize such proposals as a case of executive overreaching: See? She’s trying to FORCE lawmakers to pass the laws she wants. She should advocate strenuously for her positions, but there is a world of difference between advocating that a coequal branch of government do something, and using the power of one’s own branch to FORCE an issue that is the prerogative of that other branch.

The latter is not cool. Which, to turn full circle, brings us back to Tina Fey — a standing prop of her comedy is that she is not cool, not by a long shot.

But when Gov. Haley does the Bossypants routine, it’s just not as funny.

A video interview about comprehensive tax reform

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Recently, I interviewed (for Alan Cooper’s MidlandsBiz) Michael Fanning of the Olde English Consortium about the need for comprehensive tax reform in SC. It’s an old favorite cause of mine, and he speaks about it ably, so if you have ANY interest in such wonkish-but-important things, you might want to watch.

Here’s the link, in case you have trouble with the embed.

The free market at work in the SC General Assembly

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A couple of weeks ago, I appeared on Cynthia Hardy’s TV show to talk about tort reform. Because I was asked. Which just goes to show, if asked, I will talk about pretty much anything. Seriously, though… I forgot to mention it to y’all at the time, but as far as my comments are concerned, you didn’t miss much. My position on the issue is what it’s been for years — I’m not convinced on caps, and I think punitive damages (that is to say, those damages above and beyond what it takes to make the winning plaintiff whole) should go to the state — just like other punitive fines for criminal offenses. Basically, you would actually punish people who might otherwise write off lesser damages as the cost of doing business, but you remove the incentive for individuals and their attorneys to use the tort system as some sort of lottery.

For more, you can look at The State‘s editorial from earlier this year, and Cindi’s column from last year. I generally agree.

Beyond that, I’ve sort of lost track of the debate this year. I do that sometimes when neither side is pushing the position I would go for, and I have other things to do.

Seems that, according to Wesley Donehue (who works for the Senate Republicans) things are coming to a head today:

Wesley Donehue
Watching the trial lawyers in the SC Senate block tort reform.

36 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone

Hmmm. Well, I don’t suppose anyone can argue with that. I mean, it’s the free market at work, with each individual selfishly protecting his own economic interests. The Tea Party types and Sanfordistas should be thrilled. And the trial lawyers should certainly be happy.

But come to think of it, not too great for the Chamber of Commerce, or the legislative leadership. Or for the rest of us. But then, unless the legislation has changed considerably since the last time I looked at it, I’m not sure our interests would have been all that well served either way…

Keynes & Hayek throw down, bust some rhymes

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Just got around to viewing this hilarious video, which my son sent me several days ago.

Nothing like economist humor.

By the way, I suspect that the makers of this video are Hayek fans. Nothing against Keynes (I suspect their theories both have their places, depending upon circumstances), but at least in the hip-hop format, Hayek seems to make more sense..

There. So much for y’all who think I’m such a big-spender type…

Resonating, rather than governing

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Here’s an example of the kind of thing we see in a country in which democratic habits have overtaken republican ones. (And remember, I’m using those words according to the generic, original definitions, not referring to the execrable parties that go by those names.)

Just got this email from Joe Wilson:

Dear Subscriber:

This Congress, my main goal has been to bring jobs to South Carolina. Since January, I have actively encouraged job growth in South Carolina while removing barriers for job creation.  I am proud to say we are close to having 2,000 more full time jobs come to South Carolina. This week, the South Carolina House brought these jobs one step closer by voting in favor of the new Amazon amendment. This legislation would allow for Amazon to invest $125 million in a distribution facility in the Midlands. I supported this creation of jobs back in December. I stood firm on the steps of the State House supporting it on Tuesday. And even today, I am urging the State Senate to follow the lead of the State House of Representatives and pass this legislation! The Second District wants these jobs!

With Amazon coming to the Midlands, more local companies will be able to expand as a result of working with Amazon. This means more hiring across the state for small businesses. It also means new and higher-paying jobs for residents of our state. Finally, it means more dollars will be spent locally in our neighborhoods, our shopping malls, and our communities.

I am thankful for your support! As many of you know, progress is made from the bottom-up. By being vocal, we were able to get our state government to change its position 180 degrees in a matter of a few weeks. You and I both know government rarely moves that quickly. It’s a testament to your hard work and effort that we now have thousands of jobs and investment on the verge of coming to our community.

However, the bill still needs to be approved by the S.C. Senate. Please go to myFacebook page and vote in the poll to let me know how you feel.

Sincerely,

Joe Wilson
U.S. Congressman

P.S. To visit my Facebook page, please click here now.

You see, Joe has determined that in the core of his constituency, being FOR the Amazon break is a winner. Never mind that it has NOTHING to do with his job as a congressman. Unless, of course, he’d like to tell us how he’s working on a national solution to the internet shopping/sales tax issue, as both I and Amazon would like to see someone  in Congress do. Which he doesn’t mention.

Instead, he asks us to come to his Facebook page and tell him how we FEEL about this S.C. legislative issue.

This is sort of the kind of thing I was on about earlier.

Longing for the virtues of a democratic republic

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You hear people of various political stripes saying apocalyptic things about how the country is going down the tubes, or WILL go down the tubes, if this or that faction is or is not elected, and so forth.

I started my adult life with a sort of fatalistic attitude that caused such warning to sound far, far too late. In college, I took so many history electives that shortly before I graduated I realized to my surprise that I was within reach of a double major (the other major being journalism). There was no plan; I had just had a lot of room in my schedule because I had tested out of a number of courses others were required to take — foreign language, and math — and took things that interested me. And that tended to included history courses concentrating on the early decades of the United States. (I also took a few courses in Spanish and Latin American history and political science, but that has little bearing on my point today — aside from instilling in me a deep appreciation that for all our country’s flaws today, it was built on a far better foundation that those others.)

I was particularly impressed by the wisdom of those who chose to establish a republic, and resisted the fatal temptation to fall into the madness of pure democracy. And then, as I read on, I watched it seem to fall apart. There was the election of Andrew Jackson for starters, and then… well, we have simply come to accept, even demand, “leaders” who govern with all ten fingers in the wind, like the master of an old sailing vessel seeking to squeeze maximum advantage of whatever winds prevailed.

To question pure democracy today is to seem unAmerican. When, in truth, this experiment started in a different place altogether. (Oh, and before some of you start in about how it started with blacks and women and the propertyless having no say, you know that’s not what I’m talking about. We’re talking about parallel phenomena, not factors that are dependent on one another. It’s not about upper-class white male leaders with their hair tied into queues. It’s about thoughtful, restrained leadership of vision, regardless of the demographics of those providing it. Frankly, I think Barack Obama has it in him to provide the kind of leadership that the Founders envisioned, unlike anyone who has thus far gotten much press on the GOP side. He has the ability to rise above the popular passions of the moment and see beyond them — which is one reason why so many of the most passionate today despise him so.)

Anyway, that introduction was longer than I intended. I just wanted to call your attention to a David Brooks column from a couple of weeks back — one which I missed, but which was called to my attention today by Kelly Payne via Facebook (she brought it up in a context I didn’t quite follow, but I was glad to see it nonetheless). An excerpt:

… As Kristol points out in the essay, the meaning of the phrase “public spiritedness” has flipped since the 18th century. Now we think a public-spirited person is somebody with passionate opinions about public matters, one who signs petitions and becomes an activist for a cause.

In its original sense, it meant the opposite. As Kristol wrote, it meant “curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility.” Instead of self-expression, it meant self-restraint. It was best exemplified in the person of George Washington.

Over the years, the democratic values have swamped the republican ones. We’re now impatient with any institution that stands in the way of the popular will, regarding it as undemocratic and illegitimate. Politicians see it as their duty to serve voters in the way a business serves its customers. The customer is always right.

A few things have been lost in this transition. Because we take it as a matter of faith that the people are good, we are no longer alert to arrangements that may corrode the character of the nation. For example, many generations had a moral aversion to debt. They believed that to go into debt was to indulge your basest urges and to surrender your future independence. That aversion has clearly been overcome.

We no longer have a leadership class — of the sort that existed as late as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations — that believes that governing means finding an equilibrium between different economic interests and a balance between political factions. Instead, we have the politics of solipsism. The political culture encourages politicians and activists to imagine that the country’s problems would be solved if other people’s interests and values magically disappeared…

Brooks is concerning himself with rather prosaic, although nevertheless important, issues such as spending (“The democratic triumph has created a nation that runs up huge debt and is increasingly incapable of finding a balance between competing interests”). And doing so rather from the position that we do too much of it. But there are broader themes in what he’s saying, and those are what appealed to me.

How much do I actually NEED to know about the bin Laden raid?

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How much of what THEY know do WE need to know?

Here’s a consideration I hadn’t though much about before now, and should have (given all those spy novels, and military history books, and Tom Clancy thrillers I’ve read):

Has the U.S. Said Too Much About the Bin Laden Raid?

Military officials fret that constant stream of leaks may hinder future missions, put Navy SEALs at risk.

By Josh Voorhees | Posted Friday, May. 13, 2011, at 11:09 AM EDT

In the nearly two weeks since the U.S. operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, a near-constant stream of detailed information about the raid’s specifics has seeped out from White House officials, lawmakers, and pretty much anyone else with security clearance.

But that’s not how things were supposed to be, at least not according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out Bin Laden,” Gates told Marines at a Wednesday town hall at Camp Lejeune. “That all fell apart on Monday—the next day.”…

The White House announced last week that it was done briefing reporters on the specifics of the mission, but that has done little to stop the ongoing flow of new details from being reported. The latest major leak came Thursday night, when CBS News gave a detailed play-by-play of what the Navy SEAL team’s helmet cameras captured during the raid….

There is the danger that the more we know about details of the raid, the greater potential for threatening our capability to do something like it in the future.

For instance, the lede story on The Washington Post‘s front page yesterday told us that a key element in preparing for the raid involved high-altitude drones flying WAY deeper into Pakistan than the Pakistanis suspected we were going. So that we could get higher-resolution photos than you get from satellites. And if you consider how high-resolution satellite photos can be, these images must have been pretty awesome. So… you have a revelation of greater technical capability than the world might have expected, and of a tactical deployment that no one knew about.

Of course, it’s a two-edged thing. Let enemies and potential enemies know what you can do, and it could intimidate them into deciding they don’t want the United States as their enemy after all. Or at least, it MIGHT work that way with some — say, your less fanatical foes. But let anyone know what measures you are capable of, and it empowers them to develop countermeasures. That’s a huge theme in military history — measures and countermeasures — and it never ends.

We may find all these details fascinating — I know I do. But how much of it do we really need to know?

A realistic view from another smart Republican

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To elaborate on my theme that smart Republicans know that unseating Barack Obama will be a tall order (something that the fringe people, such as those who think the Tea Party is the “voice of the people,” completely miss), I point you to this piece by Daniel Henninger.

He blames, interesting enough, new media. He says GOP candidates who start this early will be cut down to nothing by the time the campaign is over by the constant drip of criticism on Twitter. It’s related to what we spoke of four years ago as Romney’s YouTube problem.

Strangely, he doesn’t see this as a problem for Obama, and his explanation of that is odd:

Meanwhile, it’s good to be president. With his opponents determined to spend a year and a half telling each other why “no one” is worth supporting, turning off contributors and independent voters, Barack Obama floats below the radar vacuuming up campaign cash at fund raisers.

He does make a legitimate point in the next sentence, however:

Every GOP candidate’s utterance is wholly political, but the Obama fundraisers and “policy speeches” are submerged in the presidency.

But he got the metaphor wrong. A president doesn’t fly BELOW the radar, but in a way above it. He’s fully visible, but can cloak his political statements in doing the job. Yep, that’s an advantage of incumbency. And always has been.

What Henninger ignores is that Obama has been thoroughly tested by new media, and not found wanting. There is nothing that can be thrown at a candidate via Tweets that hasn’t been hurled at him millions of times. And he sort of dropped the Big One on those flak sites a couple of weeks ago with the long form of his birth certificate, and his well-tempered scorn at his most imaginative critics. And, you know, by killing bin Laden. And, more substantially, by not being the extremist that his most extreme critics would paint him as.

If the GOP wants to prevail, it needs to come up with a candidate who can likewise endure the thousand slings and arrows. But the ones with that kind of substance are increasingly reluctant to get in.

In the end, Henninger rightly assesses the situation thusly, given the field as it stands:

A Republican candidate committed to running this gauntlet has to believe that come November 2012, the party will have nowhere else to go but to the polls to pull the lever for the last one standing. This assumes that the messaging power of electronic networks will magnify them. I believe the opposite: Given this much time, the medium eventually will melt them. The president, head ever up, will hold his ground.

The message in this for Republicans is that they need to come up with a candidate who, after being whittled at for 18 months, still has some substance left.

Oh, and by the way. I don’t know how Henninger votes. But if he isn’t a Republican, he missed a good chance.

You and your “filter bubble,” and the impact on society

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This is a fascinating little spoken essay over at TED, and as the site boasts, is indeed an “idea worth spreading.” Actually, a bunch of ideas — ideas and observations I’ve made before — although neatly tied together.

Here are some of the things that it discusses:

  • The idea of the personal “filter bubble,” which is unique to you and yet — and this is critical — not chosen by you. It’s chosen by the algorithms with which you are interacting, based on information that has been gathered about you. I’m not just talking about the obvious ads you see. I’m talking about — to use the example Eli Pariser uses in the video — if you Google “Egypt,” you don’t get the same information that someone else gets when they Google “Egypt.” It’s like you’re in parallel universes.
  • That these algorithms are the things replacing editors like me — the people who made a profession out of filtering the vast amounts of information that is available into something digestible and understandable to a person in the real world with only one set of eyes and 24 hours in the day.
  • That instead of empowering you, though — which is the myth of the Internet, that regular folks have been all liberated from us wicked, manipulating editors controlling what they see and what is published — this new, impersonal mechanism is manipulating you, and doing it in isolation, and in a way that you are unlikely to notice. (As I type that, I start to think more and more of “The Matrix.”) Rather than being more connected to the world, it’s like you are being fed a personalized information flow in your own little solitary confinement cell.
  • There is, in other words, a dark side to the my-this and my-that way that websites are often marketed to you. I’ve always had a visceral, negative response to that stuff, but I always thought it was because of my communitarianism. And the fact that it spelled the death of the mass media in which I made my living, which depended upon a notion of common space, and common concerns. This has given me another reason to be bugged by it.
  • To explore that isolation thing further… back in the 80s, we MSM journalists decried the plethora of specialty magazines that were increasingly popular. People were more and more subscribing to “Left-Handed Gay Bicyclist Journal” rather than publications based in the notion that we’re all in a society together. The Web really exacerbated that tendency. (But that’s not what did in the newspaper industry. What did it in was the business side of that — the fact that businesses started marketing directly to customers and potential customers directly, first through direct mail, then through those little plastic tags on your keychain, then through the Web. That shut out mass media, media aimed at whole communities.) The reason, we kept telling people, that YOU should care was that representative democracy depended upon a sense of shared interests, or at least shared sources of information, to some extent. But at least we thought people were freely choosing this. The fascinating thing about the “filter bubble” is how software is choosing it for you, largely without your full realization.
  • This is like 1915 again. Early in the last century, as people started realizing how important newspapers were to democracy itself, you started to see the development of certain ethics about objectivity and fairness, etc. There started to be an assumption of SOME responsibility by editors, rather than just bulling along being shills for this or that political movement — which is what newspapers had been since the founding of the republic. As imperfect as that system of safeguards was, it was at least something. Now we don’t have it. The Internet is the Wild West. If democracy is to be well served, some sorts of standards also need to emerge on the Web.

Something he doesn’t directly address but I will. What’s going on right now — in a tiny way on this blog, in lots of other ways in thousands of other places — is that people are trying to figure out the new business model for news on the state and local level. The old model has collapsed, but there’s still a strong demand for the information and commentary — as strong as ever. The thing is, the old business model wasn’t related to that demand — newspapers were paid for by advertisers, not readers. I believe in markets enough that I believe a new model for paying for newsgathering in order to meet that demand will emerge. But will it be one that supports an informed electorate, the kind upon which a liberal representative democracy depends?

And by the way, this is not about “that bad Internet.” The message is better summed up in his conclusion:

We really need the internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being… and it’s not going to do that, if it leaves us all isolated, in a web of one.

Anyway, that’s enough for me. Y’all are all empowered and everything now. Watch it yourself.

‘Hypocrite’ isn’t the right word for Sanford

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There’s a discussion about character going on right now on “Talk of the Nation:”

We’re often taken aback when a respected governor or political candidate, or our own husband or wife, cheats. But psychologist David DeSteno argues that a growing body of evidence shows that everyone — even the most respected among us — has the capacity to act out of character.

… and I was struck by the fact that the segment started off with Mark Sanford as exhibit A.

Inevitably, talk turned to his “hypocrisy.”

I don’t see him as a “hypocrite.” But then, I didn’t see him as a guy who would so brazenly and spectacularly cheat on his wife (or do so on Father’s Day weekend), so what do I know?

But I still don’t see him as a “hypocrite.”

That’s a word that gets bandied about a good deal in our politics, particularly by social liberals talking about social conservatives who turn out to be human (and, as I said, sometimes spectacularly). It tends to reflect a couple of mutually-reinforcing elements of a world view: People who espouse traditional moral values are not only wrong, but they don’t even mean it! I mean, how could they, really? So it’s relevant to discuss.

Andy Griffith’s character on “A Face In the Crowd” was a hypocrite — a super-folksy alleged populist with a deep contempt for the masses. But Sanford — I think he always believed what he espoused, including “family values.” And still does, in his own weird way.

However, there were OTHER things they were saying on the show that were dead on, with regard to Sanford and the rest of us. Yep, he is a towering monument to rationalization. And yep, human character does tend to be “dynamic.” In spite of the root of the word, character is not stamped on us as indelibly as the image on a coin. It’s something you have to work at every day. And just because you act inconsistently with what you say on Wednesday doesn’t mean you didn’t believe it on Tuesday. Or on Thursday.

What Sanford revealed in my own far-from-omniscient opinion was a startling lack of depth, mixed with narcissism.

The narcissism shouldn’t have been a surprise, given his profoundly Randian (as in Ayn Rand, author of “The Virtue of Selfishness”) political views. Actually, it WAS a surprise, but it shouldn’t have been.

As for the lack of depth — the guy’s analysis of himself and what he openly acknowledged as his sin didn’t even go skin deep. He went around apologizing to everybody, but with an unrepentant blandness that seemed to take it as a matter of course that we were obligated to forgive him, while he blithely went about continuing to consort with this mistress. Because, you know, that’s what he wanted to do.

But “hypocrisy”? That both oversimplifies, and misses the mark…

Trotsky, and other Reds In Name Only

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The Old Man in Mexico with some American comrades.

Something about our finding and killing bin Laden in his home after all these years got me to thinking about Leon Trotsky.

Yeah, I know — not the same thing at all. We’re not the USSR, and President Obama isn’t Stalin. And people knew Trotsky was in Mexico, and he wasn’t killed by Spetznaz commandos (and I think it would kind of anachronistic if he had been).

But still, it made me think of him. The mind sometimes makes strange leaps.

Trotsky wasn’t far from my mind because a while back, I started reading a recent biography about his Mexico years. I had been attracted to it by a review in the WSJ, and asked for it and got it for my birthday or something last year. I had been really curious about the story of a top icon of the Russian Revolution living south of our border, and largely supported by American Trotskyists.

But after the first few chapters, and reading all about the soap opera with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and ALL the propaganda from Moscow and from Trotsky himself over the show trials and so forth, I got bogged down.

And the thing that wore me down the most, that frankly bored me to tears, was all the long-distance ideological arm-wrestling. You know how I have little patience with ideologues. There were all these titanic arguments going back and forth between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists about who was the REAL commie, each side working so hard to delegitimize the other (with the stakes being life or death for Trotsky), essentially accusing each other of being RINOs — Reds In Name Only.

And I just couldn’t care about any of them. I mean, talk about pointless. Trotsky was as ruthless as they come, while Stalin was one of the great monsters of the century. And it was pathetic that leftists in this country would actually take up the cudgels to defend or make excuses for either of them. The arguments over doctrine — stupid, irrelevant points of doctrine argued heatedly among people who, ironically given what they believed in, were on the wrong side of history — were particularly tedious.

At some point, I need to get back to the book and see how the guy with the ice ax got in and did the deed. But I haven’t been able to make myself do so yet…

It appears she’s not Mark Sanford after all (at least, not on this). Good for Gov. Haley!

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At least, not on this point.

Assuming that Nikki Haley actually does sign the ATV safety bill today, she deserves a huge “Huzzah” from rational South Carolinians everywhere.

His repeated vetoes of this bill stand as the most malicious, harmful instances of his bloodless application of ideological abstractions to governance. His stance shocked the sensibilities of even some libertarians.

It’s ridiculous that something so common-sense as this bill should be “progress” in this state, but it is. And we must celebrate what little we get in that regard, because sometimes we go backwards.

Case in point: Myrtle Beach expects to be flooded with bikers this year because it has rescinded its “controversial” ordinance requiring that helmets be worn.

Where else would such a no-brainer (pun intended) be regarded as “controversial”? OK, maybe some places out West. Or wherever large numbers of bikers gather. But it’s still very us.

New GOP chair with a video of his own

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Just got this a few minutes ago. Evidently, Chad Connelly is feeling the need to answer those videos his counterpart keeps pumping out, and was eager enough to do so that he didn’t wait for fancy production values (maybe he thought he had to send off to Texas for that), but went ahead and got out a quick-and-dirty clip.

My first impression is similar to the impression I formed when Mr. Connelly introduced himself to me today at the Capital City Club: Personable, upbeat. I thought for a moment that he was going to be, intentionally and strategically, more positive than attack dog Harpootlian.

But then he got into standard GOP talking points, such as the current silliest one of all, “the looming specter of Obamacare.”

Anyway, this is going to be lively…

Wait — didn’t I say earlier I was going to cut back on the party stuff? Oh, well…

… and what Noam Chomsky thinks

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I just shared with you a poll about what normal Americans think about killing Osama bin Laden. Here’s what Noam Chomsky thinks:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s…

“Uncontroversially,” he said. Which sort of makes him demonstrably, inarguably, objectively — that is to say, “uncontroversially” — wrong, doesn’t it?

As usual.

Ran across that this morning, and had been meaning to share it with you all day. Talk about your outliers. Talk about your people who are very, very lucky that they live in this particular country — or in a pluralistic liberal democracy, in any case.

Chomsky ended his statement with,

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

Yep.

As you may know, bin Laden was a Chomsky admirer. Liked to quote him.

Sweetness is in the eye of the beholder

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The Elephant In The Room from SCGOP on Vimeo.

First, sorry about all the posts the last few days about political parties. Such as this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. It’s a disagreeable subject, and one that I usually avoid rather scrupulously. But ever since I made the mistake of delving a bit into the Democrats’ intraparty politics, and then their convention, and then the Republicans’ convention, my attention has been drawn more than usual to this unseemly, depressing topic.

I’m sure I’ll climb out of this ditch soon. But in the meantime… my attention was drawn to the above “sweet video” — his words — by Wesley Donehue.

It generates in me several unpleasant thoughts:

  • My biggest question of all is, who are the “they” that the video repeatedly refers to? First, I don’t know ANYONE who said some of these things. And even if someone did say them, surely the same person/people didn’t say ALL of them? And who would pay any attention to anyone who DID say these things? Which pundits said the GOP was “heading backwards” two years ago? (Personally, I said — and still believe — that after the 2008 defeat that the NATIONAL party, not the SC one, was demoralized to the point that it left a vacuum that was being filled by extremists — and that has certainly had its effects here. But that’s not “heading backwards;” it’s heading somewhere I’d never seen the party go before.) Who on earth ever thought for a moment that Republicans “could never retain the governorship?” Whoever said, ungrammatically, that a “woman governor” was impossible? (For those who didn’t get my point about “ungrammatical” — and fewer and fewer people do these days — “woman” is a noun, not an adjective.) And who even CARED about when the GOP would pay off its mortgage? Talk about your esoteric insider concerns. And on and on.
  • The video illustrates, better than the recent ones Harpootlian has been pumping out, one of the main things that is wrong with political parties: It’s this assumption that because something wears Brand X, it is GOOD. It reminds me of those cars I see with multiple bumper stickers on them, and they are almost always (I could, if all such cars I’ve ever seen were to parade before me, count the exceptions on one hand, with fingers left over) all of one party. As though a thinking person could possibly get so worked up in favor of Candidate A as to deface his or her car with a bumper sticker, and then get so enraptured with another, and another, and another, and they would ALL be of the same party, when that’s the only “virtue” they share. The odds against that, if the voter THINKS about each candidate and makes a discerning choice, are astronomical. And yet that’s what one almost always sees. In this case, we are to embrace the election of Nikki Haley as a GOOD THING (which, deep down, a lot of Republicans do not), and the defeat of John Spratt as an equally good thing, and … this is the part that strains credulity… for the same reasons! When the only characteristics we are given for judging those phenomena are that Ms. Haley is a Ms., and Mr. Spratt has been in office 28 years. Well, those and the fact that the victor in each case happens to wear the Republican label, which is a most dubious unifying characteristic.
  • Finally, according to Wesley, this video about how wonderful it is that the Republican Party treads unopposed across the face of South Carolina was produced by Texans. Specifically, this one and this one. So… apparently the paradise that the GOP rules over here is incapable of producing anyone with the talent to produce a “sweet video.” Or so we are left to gather. Sorry, but ever since I went into the advertising/marketing/communications game I’ve learned to have a low opinion of those who insist on procuring such services from out of state. Like nobody here needs the business, or is good enough.

Well, I could go on, but I won’t. OK, one more point: “Sweet” is an odd thing to call such strident triumphalism. One practically hears the stamp of boots marching in the background, it is SO triumphalist.

OK, I get it; this is a love letter to Karen Floyd. But who saw it as worthwhile to spend money — OUT OF STATE — to produce such a thing? What is its worth to anyone, other than Karen, who is departing the stage?

I’ve just got to start ignoring all this party stuff and find something more pleasant to write about.