I listened to Leonard Lopate’s interview with Carrie Fischer earlier this week. Today, I just came across an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show. She’s one interesting broad – to use an old term – and incredibly open about the troubles of her life. From the calls from Cary Grant telling her to stop taking acid to the breakup of her celebrity parents’ marriage to her job fixing up troubled scripts to the electro-shock therapy she now undergoes regularly (despite having lost four months of memories to it) to manage her manic-depression.
Category: Political Philosophy
This tidbit from James Pethokoukis’s blog over as USN&WR makes me want to read Douthat’s and Salam’s new book:
Another interesting healthcare reform option is highlighted by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in the book Grand New Party. Uncle Sam would require individuals and families to put 15 percent of their income into health savings accounts. If you run out of money before year-end, the government steps in. If you don’t, you get the money back or it rolls over into a retirement account.
This idea seems to have promise – though without seeing the ancillary details, there are some glaring issues with it on process grounds, even as you can see the proposal working out ratehr well under most circumstances in the world. It seems to penalize those with families, by reducing their retirement funds; those without an income would not have to face the trade-off that seems essential to their system working – choosing between retirement savings and health care; and preventive medicine would seem to be discouraged, although it is seen by most wonks as the surest way to reduce overall health care costs. Why get a regular check-up if you’re depleting your retirement savings to do so?
The plan seems designed mainly to tackle two political problems – the lack of health insurance for many Americans; and the moral hazard of having unrestricted access to health care. It’s rather ingenious, even if I’m not sure that the second factor should be taken too seriously. People want to avoid going to the doctor – or at least I do. This policy almost seems designed to create a massive sociological experiment. Aside from short-term medical emergencies, people would be forced to create health care and retirement strategies that balanced their long-term financial needs with their short-term health care decisions. Should I get the botox, or save more for retirement? Should I schedule this regular check-up? Should I spend money on these various preventive steps and live longer – or save more so I can spend my fewer years in a splendid retirement?
I’m sure it’s worth checking out the book just to see what other ideas Salam and Douthat have to reinvigorate conservatism.
But for now, Obama’s plan – or some variation between the rather similar Clinton, Obama, and Edwards plans – is the right way to go. It’s the shortest route to improving our current mess.
The core problem we need to solve though isn’t that our health insurance system as currently instituted is flawed, but that health insurance as the primary means of dealing out health care is flawed. Politically, the Obama/Clinton/Edwards path of patching up the current system is the only feasible one at the moment – to improve the status quo marginally. But there are far too many perverse incentives – for health insurance companies, for patients, for doctors in a health insurance system.
Of course, James Pethokoukis has greater things on his mind than our rotten health care system. He seems to be concerned that if Obama is able to pass a program that actually gives substantial benefits to Americans, it will move America to the left. Which is why he has now declared that it is the responsibility of the Republicans to stop this idea or face destruction. After all – the average American hasn’t seen much improvement in their lives as a result of the government in a long time. His theory is, once a competent liberal is able to pass a plan that substantially improves a problem in the lives of many Americans, then people will abandon the anti-government rhetoric of the conservative movement and abandon the program of incessant and regressive tax cuts.
The fear of socialism lingers like a spectre.
So, Pethokoukis proposes Republicans do anything they can to stop “Obamacare,” in order to save themselves. His little speech reminds me of a football coach trying to psych his team up for the game. But he’s playing with fire.
In light of this market disaster, this financial earthquake, some necessary changes are required to be made to our grand social bargain. Free trade is a good thing – but it creates chaos in it’s wake. The financial crisis is just the latest symptom. Obamanomics is a pragmatic, liberal approach to treating the core disease – which is not free trade or globalization, but destabilization. Obamanomics does not ideologically prescribe government intervention as Reaganomics proscribed it. Rather, it is a series of pragmatic first steps. It does not have as it’s goal the creation of some Great Society as previous versions of liberalism did; and it also does not merely try to find a Third Way between the Left and Right as Clinton did.
The key factor in understanding Obamanomics is that it does not force it’s values in the hoped for end result, but instead in the processes of getting there. Rather than imagining a perfect world and attempting to bring America to this goal, Obamanomics tries to improve what is already here, especially by instituting processes that inherently reflect core values like transparency, accountability, fairness, a long-term strategic orientation, and an aversion to government coercion.
When one declares oneself to be a conservative, one is not, unfortunately, thereupon visited by tongues of fire that leave one omniscient. The acceptance of a series of premises is just the beginning. After that, we need constantly to inform ourselves, to analyze and to think through our premises and their ramifications. We need to ponder, in the light of the evidence, the strengths and the weaknesses, the consistencies and the inconsistencies, the glory and the frailty of our position, week in and week out. Otherwise we will not hold our own in a world where informed dedication, not just dedication, is necessary for survival and growth.
William F. Buckley Jr., Feb 8, 1956, National Review, as cited by Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner yesterday without a hint of irony.
On this day after what would have been William F. Buckley Jr.’s birthday, it’s worth reflecting on the man’s legacy. I am not the proper individual to evaluate Buckley’s legacy completely – but I think it’s accurate to say that Buckley is one of the dozen intellectuals who has most influenced my life. I take from him lessons both positive and negative – from his wonderful, timeless, definition of conservatism as standing athwart history shouting, “Stop!” to his determined resistance to Brown v. Board of Education.
There are a number of things that struck me about Buckley – his confidence, even arrogance; his style, almost delicate; his incredible life – from spy to magazine publisher; his magazine – brash, often wrong, generally provocative; his intellectual force, especially in that book which introduced me to him, Up From Liberalism. But what struck me most of all was that he was sensible. I mean that as the highest compliment.
He opposed Brown v. Board of Education, as poor of a decision as that might have been, for sensible reasons – in an attempt to preserve a system of federalism and social harmony. He opposed liberalism for sensible reasons – preferring the status quo to attempts to remake humanity. When liberalism became overripe and overreached – he was there condemning it. When conservatism became corrupted and overly ambitious, he was a voice of warning.
Buckley was not always right – but he was generally sensible – and it’s hard to expect more in a public intellectual.
In Europe during most of the twentieth century (here come a few shameless generalizations), the political thinkers of the right and the left have pictured the best of all societies as something other than democracy. The better world of their fancy might have been (depending on party affiliation) feudal, fascist, Communist, or revolutionary socialist in one of several versions – but it was not likely to be democratic in any ordinary sense. In the European imagination, democracy was a politics of compromise and true. It evoked a spirit of tolerance, moderation, caution, sobriety, rationality, and fatigue, which might amount to wisdom, but also to mediocrity. Democracy was something to arrive at only when the bright dream of exterminating one’s enemies no longer seemed within reach and the notion of a truly superior society had been abandoned. It was a “secondary love derived from a primary hatred,” in Andre Gluckmann’s phrase.
Paul Berman in A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968, pages 49 – 50.
Mark Lilla described the downfall of the conservative intellectual movement in last week’s Wall Street Journal, describing how conservative intellectuals in the 1960s had originally and self-consciously understood themselves to be elites, trying to educate the public, as the public overwhelming supported liberal politicians. Lilla describes the changes as the sons and daughters of these thinkers took over the institutions of the conservative movement from The Weekly Standard to The National Review, just as conservative politicians began to win elections. This generation – Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, and the rest was different:
Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders’ intellectual virtues – indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.
Today there are a few conservative movement intellectuals left – George Will for one. One could make a case for David Brooks and David Frum. Most of the rest are party hacks – or intellectuals who happen to be conservative, rather than members of the conservative movement and it’s institutions.
This isn’t a healthy result for a two party system.
I’ve heard from a few people that there is a growing concern that Obama is anti-free-trade.
This concern has a basis in Obama’s record – mainly from his rhetoric in Ohio during the primary fight with Hillary Clinton and to some extent the fact that he is a Democrat and needed the support of the labor unions. But to a large degree the exaggerated fears of many businessmen comes from comments made by the Republicans during the campaign – as John McCain’s campaign was first (ridiculously) calling Obama “the most protectionist candidate that the Democratic Party has ever fielded” before his campaign went on to call Obama a supporter of comprehensive sex education for kindergartner, a Marxist, a socialist, and a friend to terrorists.
This has led to a series of conflicting impressions of Obama and his position on trade – from statements during the Ohio campaign that “we can’t keep passing unfair trade deals like NAFTA that put special interests over workers’ interests” to his later point – when asked about his rhetoric about NAFTA during the Ohio campaign that, “Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified.” Indeed – despite the appeal of populist protectionist rhetoric (some 60% of Americans think free trade and NAFTA have been bad for people like them), Obama chose to attack protectionism in the general campaign: “[n]ot only is it impossible to turn back the tide of globalization, but efforts to do so can make us worse off.” At least in part, Obama’s friendlier stance towards free trade has to be understood as a tactical move on his part as he was certain to be to the left of McCain on this issue. McCain has never even made an issue out of any labor or environmental protections relating to the issue and would have had serious problems with economic conservatives if he moved to the left on this issue as they never trusted him to begin with.
Even aside from the change in rhetoric, there is considerable evidence that has led numerous reasonable observers to believe Obama is, in fact, in favor of trade even as he is concerned with some of free trade’s side effects on American workers and the economy. Obama, for one, described himself as a “pro-growth, free-market guy.” Even the arch-conservative Weekly Standard was forced to concede in the midst of the general election campaign that Obama’s two main economic advisors Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, while liberals, were “centrist, pro-free traders.” George F. Will, my favorite columnist and a paleo-conservative – described Goolsbee as the best sort of liberal economist his conservative leanings could imagine:
Goolsbee no doubt has lots of dubious ideas – he is, after all, a Democrat – about how government can creatively fiddle with the market’s allocation of wealth and opportunity. But he seems to be the sort of person – amiable, empirical and reasonable – you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be.
Naomi Klein attacked these two herself as ideologically impure in a piece in The Nation magazine – and while I find Klein to be provactive, I think a pro-free trader could hardly have a better endorsement than an attack by Klein.
Obama’s official position on trade has remained consistent – even as his focus has changed over the course of the campaign. What has struck me about all of Obama’s positions is the extent to which they begin with an appreciation of conservative ideas – as his health care plan works within the market rather than by goverment fiat; as his stance on affirmative action reflects traditional concerns about whether we are trying to ensure the equality of oppurtunity or equality of the ends. His views on trade seem similar – as he embraces free markets and free trade – but wants to mitigate the negative side effects.
The Council on Foreign Relations, a group with a considerable interest in free trade, vouched for Obama’s support:
Sen. Obama (D-IL) generally supports free trade policies, though he has expressed concern about free trade agreements that do not include labor and environmental protections.
Tim Hanson and Nate Weisshaar of the Motley Fool probably best described the most reasonable concerns about Obama’s record on trade in their piece asking “Will Obama End Global Trade?” (the answer was, “Nope.”):
While Obama’s campaign literature will tell you that his goals are fairer trade, more assistance for displaced American workers, and greater global environmental protections, there is some global worry that an Obama administration might impose and sustain protectionist policies in order to reward labor union support for his campaign and get our economy back on its feet.
As private sector labor unions have been decimated in the global economy, and as Obama and the liberal consensus views them as part of the solution rather than a major problem, it’s hard to see exactly what steps Obama can take to rejuvenate unions.
In the end, the best way to understand and predict Obama’s trade policies is as part of his view of economics in general. Obama’s economic positions are consistent with a broad Democratic consensus that has emerged in the past decade – bringing together the two warring sides of the Clintonian era, short-handed as Robert Rubin versus Robert Reich for Clinton’s Labor and Treasury Secretaries. The Rubin school believed in expanding free trade, reducing deficits, encouraging overall growth without regard to it’s distribution, and deregulation. The Reich school believed in protecting labor unions, mitigating the effects of globalization through an expanded safety net and job-retraining programs, environmentalism, and was concerned with inequality. Over the past decade, many figures on both sides of this ideological divide have found worth in the ideas of their one-time competitors – as David Leonhardt’s New York Times Magazine piece called “Obamanomics” explained.
This Democratic consensus views free trade as a positive force in the world – but one that has numerous side effects that are negative. The role of government in this picture is to try to mitigate the negative effects of free trade – especially those temporary effects of the transition to a more globalized economy. Most of Obama’s domestic agenda is designed to accomplish these purposes – from the investment in a green energy industry to investment in infrastructure to health care reform to financial reforms. His nuanced position on trade reflects this same desire – to mitigate the destabilizing effects of globalization while acknowledging it’s benefits.
ka1igu1a over at the Freedom Democrats makes the obvious point in response to the hysteria arising over the Redistributionist:
If you accept the legitimacy of the State, then you necessarily accept the legitimacy of income/wealth distribution.
Of course, ka1igu1a opposes the legitimacy of the State. But he nicely evicerates McCain’s attempts to play up this non-issue by pointing out the obvious.
McCain doesn’t oppose the legitimacy of the State – he just adopts rhetoric and attitudes to win votes creating an ideological muddle.
[digg-reddit-me]Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. – or Lew Rockwell – has decided that this election calls for non-participation. “[T]here is no lesser of two evils,” he says. “There is socialism or fascism.” We will – by boycotting the vote – instill fear in our leaders that they are “ruling us without our consent.”
I expect little better from Lew Rockwell, a man who saw fit to promote racism in the service of a libertarian ideology. (I do not blame libertarianism for it’s promoters, but I can fault the individuals who used explicit race-baiting as Rockwell did.) What disturbs me about this opinion piece is in part it’s resonance – as demonstrated by it’s support on reddit. But what bothers me more is that it seems rooted in the same tendency to demonize opponents, the same desire to re-make the world in the service of ideology, the same rejection of pragmatism, the same denigration of “the masses,” as other ideologies from Communism to neoconservatism.
For the sake of clarity, Rockwell, rejects any truths too subtle to fit into a propagandist slogan – and so – Obama becomes a socialist, and McCain a fascist.
There are real problems with voting and our financial system and the centralization of power that Rockwell touches on – and for a libertarian citizen, neither candidate offers a clear libertarian policy vision. Each seems to offer government encroachment in different areas of life. But a libertarian philosophy does not necessarily lead to this theology of dueling evils that Rockwell invokes – in which we presume only our own innocence and purity while we attack anyone with power or who might gain power as inherently corrupt. There is a healthy skepticism needed about power and the powerful – but Rockwell goes beyond this.
He is one of those who is certain, full of passionate intensity. Which is why he can see Obama and McCain as two competing evils – and why he must simplify their pragmatic politics into two ideologies of certainty: fascism and socialism. But his appeal here is insidious – it is not just to those who share his certainties but to the uncertain. He calls on us to reject all alternatives in favor of … nothing – justifying this with the flimsy excuse that by shunning the political process we may have a psychological effect on the politicians.
My duty as a citizen, my duty as a political being, is to inform myself and to vote and then to participate in governance. It is an abdication of this duty to throw up my hands, moved by an old man’s bitterness at repeated defeat and disappointment, and to despair.
To be a grown-up in this world, to be a citizen, means to act even when the alternatives are only dimly understood – for we can only dimly understand our world.
We live in a complex environment where every action has unintended consequences – and the right path is rarely clear. By failing to act, we enable those whose secular or religious theology leads them to certainty to monopolize power and drag us from one extreme to another, as we have often seen in the past thirty years in America.
Which is why I will vote on November 4th.
In the event of a Republican bloodbath a week from this coming Tuesday, a battle is clearing brewing between competing visions of the Republican party – neoconservatives, the National Greatness Conservatives, the libertarians, and the christianists.
It should be interesting to watch – and I make no claim to specials powers of vaticination.
David Brooks’s last column was especially poignant – as he points out that the Republicans in this election have ceded the center and abandoned the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. He has been speaking for some time of the need for a pro-government conservative movement – which he calls National Greatness Conservatism.
Meanwhile, Radley Balko, editor of Reason, editorializes that the Republicans must lose so that in their time in the wilderness they can become, once again, the party of limited government.
I don’t think both of these visions can work together very well – as Bush’s neoconservative/christianist presidency demonstrated.
For the most part, I’m agreeing with what I’ve read and heard about this debate. Palin regained her confidence and was able to bluster her way through some tough spots without the long awkward silences that were evident in the Couric interview. Neither candidate made any significant gaffes. Palin got the name wrong of the commander in Afghanistan – and Biden, clearly knew she did, but chose not to correct her. Palin started early in the debate with a warning to the moderator, Gwen Ifill – saying she didn’t care if Ifill thought she hadn’t answered the question, because she was talking to the American people.
All that I think was evident.
There is one thing though that bothered me. Palin very clearly wanted to call into question Barack Obama’s whether Barack Obama was truly American enough. She said – on seperate occasions – that he wanted to “waive wave the white flag of surrender,” that he was planning on socializing health care, and that he voted against funding for the troops. She kept hammering that last point home despite Biden’s two very strong attempts to correct her. But she kept coming back to it:
I have great respect for your family also and the honor that you show our military. Barack Obama though, another story there.
Maybe I’m being too sensitive – but my distinct impression was that Palin was attempting to plant seeds of doubts about Obama’s Americanism in these voters. What came across in this debate was that Biden respected McCain, but thought he was incredibly wrong and dangerous. Palin respected Biden, but thought Obama was foreign-ish, un-American, and untrustworthy.
I think someone listening and taking logical stock of the debate would have to come down on the side of Biden. Someone who is not discomfited by Obama – to question whether or not he is American enough – wouldn’t be swayed by Palin’s charges. But for those voters who have an innate distrust of Obama – whether for reasons of race or class or whatever else – Palin was deliberately trying to play into those fears.
I hope I’m wrong – but my fear is that this debate is a prelude. If I’m right, after John McCain’s last debate with Obama (and to some under-the-radar extent before), a deliberate campaign will be launched to aggravate questions of race and of foreign-ness and of American-ness. I’d like to think John McCain is a man who wouldn’t stoop to that to win the presidency. I hope that that’s true. But I’m not sure it is – and it seems clear that this is McCain’s only path to victory.
The problem is that when making a charge like Obama wants to waive a white flag of surrender to the terrorists, the accusation itself sullies him. Biden didn’t defend adequately against these charges – but I’m not sure how he should have. I don’t know.
This debate left me much more concerned about how this campaign will end, although no one else seems to have picked up on this, so maybe, hopefully, I’m concerned for no reason.