Month: March 2009

Categories
Foreign Policy Pakistan Politics

The Primal Politics of Pakistan

[digg-reddit-me]The stories that have been coming out of Pakistan in the past few days have been extraordinary. It is politics being shaped by individuals at a basic and primal level, in a way only possible in an unstable nation. Just a few weeks ago, Simon Tisdall in the Guardian would write that:

Pakistan’s disintegration, if that is what is now being witnessed, is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, a riveting spectacle, and a clear and present danger to international security. But who in the world can stop it?

As President Zardari seemed to buffoonishly wield power – ham-handedly using the power of the government to sideline his opponents, resistant built up. First, he refused to honor a deal he made with his main opponent, Nawaz Sharif, to reinstate the chief justice of the Supreme Court Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry who had been dismissed by President Musharraf. This was especially significant as the civil society movement or the Lawyers Movement which was formed to protest this move of Musharaff’s was one of the primary factors forcing him to step down. Then – and I skip over a great deal here, Zardari closes down a television station for seemingly political reasons prompting, as The Daily Times reported:

Federal Information Minister Sherry Rehman resigned from her ministerial slot on Friday night to protest the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA)’s blocking of a private TV channel.

With Sharif and Sharif’s brother still agitating for change – specifically the reinstatement of Chaudhry – the current Supreme Court, which is seen to be in the pocket of Zardari, rules that neither Sharif nor his brother can hold any public office. Sharif and his N-League party begin to stage mass rallies to protest this decision – which then prompts Zardari to take even more drastic action. He places all of his political opponents under house arrest – for their own protection – and bans rallies. Over the weekend, Sharif breaks out of his house arrest to go to a large demonstration as Jane Perlez reports in the New York Times:

Sharif, who had planned to address the demonstration, left his house in a convoy of cars that broke through a ring of barriers, including barbed wire and parked buses that had been placed by the police.

When he arrived at the rally in Lahore, Sharif was aided by elements of the police sympathetic to him – and embraced by the crowd:

As his bulletproof four-wheel-drive vehicle entered the main thoroughfare of Lahore, it was showered with pink rose petals from the crowd, made up of lawyers, party workers and couples who came with their children to join what turned out to be a celebration of Mr. Sharif’s nerve.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik meanwhile urged all Pakistanis to refrain from joining the long march which was supposed to converge on the capital of Pakistan yesterday:

I urge all Pakistanis not to join the long march as we have credible information that enemies of Pakistan could take advantage of the situation.

Yet, despite this, people came out. They confronted the police and military who tried to break up the rallies – and the police and military turned back. According to Jane Perlez again:

The army did not stage a coup, but insisted that the government accept a compromise.

Perhaps it was this factor more than Sharif’s nerve or Zardari’s ham-handedness that prevented this from going down as power plays usually do in Pakistan – in bloody violence. Zardari agreed yesterday to meet the demands of the Lawyers Movement and Sharif – and to restore Chaudhry as Chief Justice. Sabrina Tavernise described the scene in Islamabad in the New York Times:

In the crowd, whose members included a radio announcer who was researching homosexuality and an illiterate mechanic who wore a flower pot on his head to stay cool and admitted to stealing monkeys to get by, one word was on everybody’s lips.

“Justice,” said Mr. Khan’s wife, Rubina Javed, smiling broadly. “We came for justice.”

The word was apt for the victory at hand: the restoration of the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, to his court. But others in a jubilant crowd celebrating on Mr. Chaudhry’s lawn on Monday were working from a broader interpretation…

“This movement has given an awareness to the common people in Pakistan of their rights,” said Shamoon Azhar, 26, a doctoral student at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, sitting on the lawn with a large group of his friends. “This is about awareness. It’s given people confidence. It’s shown people it can happen.”

Ashtar Ali, a corporate lawyer was quoted by Jane Perlez:

This is the first time in the history of Pakistan that the police and civil administration have defied orders by the government to control public demonstrations. The writ of the government has failed.

The big winner in all of this is – of course, Sharif, as a Pakistani columnist put it:

He understood the pulse of the country.

Yet at the same time, the basic story of the American relationship with Pakistan remains the same. Richard Holbrooke summed it up when asked whether Pakistan’s security forces were committed to rooting out terrorists:

I’ve rarely seen in my years in Washington an issue which is so hotly disputed internally by experts and intelligence officials.

Categories
Criticism

The Specter of Suburban Contentment

Ron Charles in the Washington Post:

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls – or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Charles does see signs of hope though – in the same place everyone seems to see hope these days, the tubes of the internet.

Categories
Foreign Policy National Security Politics The War on Terrorism

Colin Gray on China, Terrorism, and Proliferation

Colin Gray, a professor at the U. S. Army War College writes in Parameters (H/t Tom Ricks) gives lays out one of his expectations for solid national security planning:

Expect to be surprised. To win as a defense planner is not to avoid surprise. To win is to have planned in such a manner that the effects of surprise do not inflict lethal damage.

The statement, with some modifications, is a good baseline for any type of long-term planning. What I find most refreshing about Gray is the common-sensical approach he takes – and the lack of regard for what is politically acceptable to say. This of course is necessary to be an effective military planner – as a clear-eyed view of the world forces one to tackle politically fraught issues. I do not agree with all of Gray’s assessments, but unlike the opinions advanced in op-eds, they seem to be the result of a genuine engagement with the issues rather than of domestic political arguments. 

The article as a whole should be read. But here’s a sampling of his assessments:

On China:

Assessed materially, China will not be a credible near-term peer competitor for power and influence; she cannot spend enough to overcome the US lead. But China does not, and will not, accept the position of prominent member of a posse for world order led by the American sheriff. Considerations of guess what?—fear, honor, and interest—will ensure a conflictual relationship between Washington and Beijing. Both sides currently recognize this.

[At the same time] Warfare is quite likely between China and America over Taiwan, though not about Taiwan…

It is possible that the current loose strategic alliance between China and Russia will mature into a full security marriage, but this is uncertain. These nations share a strong dislike for most western values—though they agree that it is healthy to be wealthy—as well as US hegemony, but they do not share much else.

On terrorism:

Terrorists can succeed, however, only if the counterterrorists beat themselves by over-reaction. Principally, counterterrorism is a mission for the afflicted nation’s security services, not for soldiers. Terrorism does not threaten our civilization, but our over-reaction to it could do so. Terrorists do need to be hunted and thereby kept off balance, dealt with as criminals, and sometimes even shot on sight according to the permissive tenets of irregular warfare.

On nuclear proliferation:

[W]e need to recognize that our current conventional superiority obliges our enemies to seek asymmetrical offsets. The more effective are NATO’s conventional arms, the more likely it is that regional great powers would choose to emphasize a nuclear-based deterrent and defense. If you do not believe this, you are in effect claiming that, say, China or Iran would choose to be defeated in conventional war, rather than raise the stakes through nuclear escalation. That would be a heroically optimistic assumption.

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Significance of Jack Bauer

[digg-reddit-me]Dahlia Lithwick in Newsweek:

The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer or counterinsurgency expert…the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television’s “24,” Jack Bauer.

Though Lithwick’s statement may sound like an exaggeration, the most common defense of America’s torture policy has been to invoke the character of Jack Bauer on 24. John Yoo, Diane Beaver, Michael Chertoff, Tom Tancredo, and most famously Antonin Scalia have all invoked the TV show 24 in describing and defending national security law under George W. Bush. U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, saw the show’s influence as so pernicious that he he flew to visit the show’s producers to ask them to stop representing torture in such a positive light as it was undermining national security:

[Brigadier General] Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

It sounds as if the gullible students in Finnegan’s class have taken their lead from Justice Scalia who, in defending the extraordinary measures of the Bush administration, asked: 

Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles…He saved hundreds of thousands of lives…Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?

Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, whose legal memoranda aided the justification torture, claimed that Jack Bauer “gave people lots of ideas” about how to interrogate prisoners.

One thing that most of these defenders of torture do not mention – and that many opponents of torture fail to bring up – is that torture doesn’t seem to work. This is in many respects a secondary question – as the morality of torture and the “by any means necessary” approach of Jack Bauer as well as the Bush administration is debated. But Matthew Alexander, a pseodonym for a military interrogator who led the team that found Abu al-Zarqawi in Iraq, has been a vocal defender of the view that torture is an inefficient and counterproductive interrogation tool. The FBI has long maintained that their methods are proven and get reliable information from subjects – as opposed to the new torture techniques that do not. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists interrogated their high-value detainees – not because of their respect for human rights, but because they saw what was most effective. The greatest Nazi interrogator was a Hanns-Joachim Schraff who never even raised his voice, let alone tortured his subjects. He was one of the few top Nazis not tried for war crimes. Matthew Alexander – the man who got the intelligence that led to Zarqawi’s death – was one of the few adherents to Schraff’s view of interrogation in Iraq. His interrogation tools, rather than fear, violence, torture, religious persecution, and intimidation were “respect, rapport, hope, cunning, and deception.” 

Ann Applebaum points to the obvious question:

Given the overwhelmingly negative evidence, the really interesting question is not whether torture works but why so many people in our society want to believe that it works.

It may be unfair to blame 24 for this belief in the efficacy of torture. There is something deeper at work here than the propaganda of a television show. But 24 puts forth a persuasive cultural argument in which the extreme circumstances that occur every hour on the show justify extreme actions (such as threatening to harm an infant, mock executions of children; regular torture) are then used to justify American policies.

Categories
China Economics Financial Crisis History

The Reagan Revolution (cont.)

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve gotten a bit of feedback/blowback about having simplified what went on the in 1980s that led to the indisputable higher levels of income disparity, the concentration of wealth, the decimation of manufacturing, and the rise of finance. This wasn’t about Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal policies – it is claimed – but about basic economic forces. I tried to take that into account by pointing out that Reagan was only accelerating the trends that started in the 1970s – but let me go further now.

Another major factor that aided these trends was not entirely within Reagan’s control. As John Judis explained in The New Republic, in the 1980s:

…Japan was threatened by a cheaper dollar. To keep exports high, Japan intentionally held down the yen’s value by carefully controlling the disposition of the dollars it reaped from its trade surplus with the United States. Instead of using these to purchase goods or to invest in the Japanese economy or to exchange for yen, it began to recycle them back to the United States by purchasing companies, real estate, and, above all, Treasury debt…

With Japan’s purchases, the United States would not have to keep interest rates high in order to attract buyers to Treasury securities, and it wouldn’t have to raise taxes in order to reduce the deficit…[That] informal bargain…became the cornerstone of a new international economic arrangement…

Judis goes on to explain how this arrangement evolved through the 1990s:

Asian countries, led by China, adopted a version of Japan’s strategy for export-led growth… They maintained trade surpluses with the United States; and, instead of exchanging their dollars for their own currencies or investing them internally, they, like the Japanese, recycled them into T-bills and other dollar-denominated assets. This kept the value of their currencies low in relation to the dollar and perpetuated the trade surplus by which they acquired the dollars in the first place…

Until recently, there have been clear upsides to this bargain for the United States: the avoidance of tax increases, growing wealth at the top of the income ladder, and preservation of the dollar as the international currency…

[The current financial system] is sustained by specific national policies. The United States has acquiesced in large trade deficits – and their effect on the U.S. workforce – in exchange for foreign funding of our budget deficits. And Asia has accepted a lower standard of living in exchange for export-led growth and a lower risk of currency crises.

This financial arrangment was not created by Ronald Reagan – but he did acquiese to it – and spent America into a level of indebtedness it had not been in since World War II. This arrangment would not be consistent with a ideological neoliberalism that was discussed before – but this arrangment, most importantly, did benefit many of those who were vocal proponents of neoliberalism. 

The revolutions of the 1980s then, was not merely the result of a political movement within America – not anymore than the revolutions of the 1960s were. There were international factors that helped along both domestic movements. The combination of this special relationship with Japan – and later China and other Asian countries – with the neoliberal revolution of Ronald Reagan – led to a concentration of wealth and power within a small class of people rarely seen in a developed country. As Paul Krugman observed:

It’s important to know that no other advanced economy has seen a comparable surge in inequality – even the rising inequality of Thatcherite Britain was a faint echo of trends here.

Combined with the neoliberal principle, as described by Stanley Fish, that “Short-term transactions-for-profit [are better than] long-term planning designed to produce a more just and equitable society,” it becomes more clear how we ended up in this enormous financial mess. 

Take away the regulations; encourage short-term profits; reduce taxes; trim the social safety net; “starve the beast” by spending without taxing; and then supercharge the economy with constant stimulus spending (which is what “starve the beast” is) and easy debt from China and Japan. What you get from this is not only a revolution that undermines the American way of life in the mid-term – as wealth is concentrated and middle class and manufacturing jobs dry up – but an unsustainable economy that is going to collapse, and collapse hard. 

In other words, you get what we have now.

Today, we are reaping the effects of the generational bargain at the heart of the Reagan presidency.

Categories
Economics Financial Crisis History Political Philosophy Politics

The Reagan Revolution

[digg-reddit-me]In which I discuss a repeated theme of this blog – the two domestic revolutions of the past 50 years that undermined the ever-evolving “American way of life” and caused profound social, economic, and political anxieties. The Reagan Revolution did for money what the ’60s did for sex – and today we are paying the price. 

The 1960s are remembered today – for better or worse – for the social, cultural, and sexual revolutions which roiled the nation between 1960 and 1972. The iconic images and movements of the later, more radical years of the time period primarily involve forces that undermined American mores and traditions. Flower children, the Summer of Love, LSD, marijuana, rock and roll, SDS, teach-ins, Black Panthers – the cumulative force of these challenges to the American way of life led to a backlash, which Richard Nixon and his counterparts rode to power. By 1968, many Americans felt as if their way of life were under siege from radical forces – oftentimes, a radicalism embraced even by their children. Riots broke out in major American cities; illegal drugs were consumed conspicuously and without shame; sex was given freely and openly; the legitimacy of the military, of the government, and of the academy were all questioned and often attacked – all of this in the name of freedom and in protest against the societal structures and rules that had heretofore defined the American experience. By the end of the 1960s, the “silent majority” felt their way of life under attack by these sixties revolutions, as Richard Nixon explained in a speech connecting major societal problems to the “sixties” experience:

We are reaping the whirlwind for a decade of growing disrespect for law, decency and principle in America.

Aside from Richard Nixon, the most prominent beneficiary of this counter-revolution, this reaction against the sixties revolution, was a second-rate actor turned politician, Ronald Reagan. He ran for governor on a law and order platform – pledging to beat back the forces of chaos and freedom to protect the compromises that were the basis for the American way of life. Reagan made a national name for himself by taking aggressive measures to quash the college demonstrations of the “communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants” at the University of California, Berkley campus.

In defending his extreme measures that resulted in the death of a student in the aftermath of a police riot, Reagan drew a line in the sand:

If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.

Reagan’s popularity stemmed in a large measure from how he was able to harness his populist law-and-order stands with a sunny optimism about America. But when Reagan finally took power in 1980, he did not merely attempt to reverse the 1960s revolutions. He unleashed a new revolution, undermining American values and traditions just as radically as the 1960s revolutions had. As Stephen Metcalf explained in Slate:

The ’80s did for money what the ’60s did for sex.

Metcalf goes on:

They told a miraculously tempting lie about the curative powers of disinhibition. It took AIDS, feminism, and sociobiology a while to catch up to our illusions about free love. It has taken cronyism, speculation, and manic overleveraging a while to catch up to our illusions about free money.

Reagan himself revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal but the forces he unleashed were determined to overthrow not just the Great Society programs of the 1960s and the social, cultural, and sexual revolutions of that decade, but the New Deal of the 1930s and the social and economic structure that sprang from the Depression and the government involvement in its aftermath. The Reagan administration unleashed a neoliberal revolution. While Reagan’s support and popularity was to a large degree a result of his stands against the social, cultural, and sexual revolutions of the 1960s against the commonly accepted American values and traditions, his administration unleashed its own revolution which likewise attacked and undermined commonly accepted American values and traditions.

As Stanley Fish recently described neoliberalism in the New York Times:

Whereas in other theories, the achieving of a better life for all requires a measure of state intervention, in the polemics of neoliberalism (elaborated by Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek and put into practice by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), state interventions — governmental policies of social engineering — are “presented as the problem rather than the solution” (Chris Harman, “Theorising Neoliberalism,” International Socialism Journal, December 2007).

The free market was seen by these neoliberals as a natural phenomenon that was destroyed by government involvement rather than the government- and society-tended creation that it actually is, as has commonly been understood by Americans from Alexander Hamilton to Theodore Roosevelt. This neoliberal revolution began with much less fanfare and demonstration and less popular support and revolt than the sixties revolutions, but its effects were at least as profound. There were not the same iconic or disturbing images of radicalism and culture war, or catalyzing events like Woodstock, in this second domestic revolution, but the impact on the fabric that bound and organized the nation was just as profound. By explicitly seeking to undermine the “American system” of capitalism and especially the changes to the social contract since the New Deal (which involved the government regulation of businesses, a focus on local and small corporations rather than consolidation, a focus on labor and manufacturing instead of high finance, and a strong, robust middle class that was the focus of a growing economic prosperity) the Reagan revolution accelerated the trends that had begun to appear in the 1970s. Income inequality soared, middle and lower income stagnated while the wealthiest rose, businesses combined and became ever larger, and regulations were relaxed. In what became known as the Great Divergence, the wealth produced by American society stopped being spread out to the middle class and became concentrated in an ever smaller percentage of the population. The very shape of our society changed as a result of Reagan’s revolutions – and American families began to feel squeezed, until the effects of this revolution became more pronounced. By the 2000s, this “silent majority” again felt under seige – though without the same sense of focus as neoliberals actively sought to shift the blame for these economic attacks on the middle class to the 1960s revolutions in a manner that was still resonant for older Americans.

And while the effects of the sixties revolutions have been widely discussed, the effects of the revolution of the 1980s have been largely unspoken. The concentration of wealth in ever smaller percentages of the population, the economic focus on finance over labor, manufacturing, or industry, the slashing of the social safety net, the push for ever bigger corporations, and the relaxation of any type of regulation. 

Thus Reagan, opposing the cultural, social, and sexual revolutions of the 1960s overthrowing conventions that held together American society, unleashed a new economic, financial, and governmental revolution that overthrew the social contract of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the economic and governmental conventions that held American society together.

Categories
Economics Financial Crisis The Opinionsphere

AIG Explains Why It Is Too Big To Fail

The short answer: Yes.

The longer answer: This “Strictly Confidential” document that appeared on Scribd appears to be the same one that Andrew Ross Sorkin described last week in the New York Times as “getting a lot of attention” “inside the corridors of power in Washington.” The presentation is not addressed to anyone explicitly, but it appears to be meant as a kind of briefing on the importance of bailing out AIG for Congressmen and other second-level decision-makers unfamiliar with finance. As is my occasional practice, I’m excerpting some of the more important/interesting points raised in the document for convenient citation later.

This first point is obvious, but still bracing to hear from the source:

Without additional federal tools being deployed in the AIG situation, AIG will not be able to repay its obligations. Despite adequate current security against the U.S. government’s investment, that investment may not be recovered. 

Although some critics of the current approach have begun to question whether the collapse of Lehman led to the fallout that immediately began, it seems pretty clear to me as well as to most who were in the loop at the time that the fallout was the result of Lehman’s collapse. AIG wants to point out that the government did not adequately understand what would happen with the fall of Lehman Brothers – and that AIG is far bigger, more complex and interconnected than Lehman ever was:

Just as the government was unable to predict that the failure of Lehman would lead to the collapse of the Reserve Fund, followed by much of the money market industry, the government would be even less capable of predicting the fallout from the collapse of a much larger, more global and more consumer-oriented institution such as AIG.

Then of course, AIG begins to explain how it’s subsidiaries are essential to the running of the government in general:
AIU insures the U.S. military, the U.N., U.S. and foreign embassies, and important commercial and other organizations worldwide, including the Panama Canal, oil rigs, trucking, marine cargo and Doctors without Borders.
 
AIU’s Defense Base Act program provides coverage to contractors in support of the rebuilding of the infrastructure in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Also, another subsidiary could take down many cities as:
AIGCI is the second largest U.S. investor in municipal bonds.
The report comes to the following conclusions:
  • Insurance is the oxygen of the free enterprise system. Without the promise of protection against life’s adversities, the fundamentals of capitalism are undermined.
  • The failure of the world’s largest insurer at a time of major global financial and economic instability will exacerbate the challenge of reigniting consumer confidence. 
  • Since life insurance has changed greatly in character over the last two decades – from just a basic provision of death and disability benefits to a vehicle for retirement savings and wealth accumulation – the effects of disrupting the industry are wideranging and significant. 
  •  There is a legitimate public policy rationale for regulatory reform of the industry, and the federal government continuing role in AIG’s destiny would be consistent with such a policy direction.

In other words, AIG is too big and too important to fail. It’s probably true – but it’s a big galling to hear a company asking to be bailed out – again and again and again and again – making it. Especially after that company just announced the largest ever quarterly loss in the history of capitalism.

Categories
Economics Financial Crisis Politics

The Battle of the Rich

Newsweek Finance editor and Slate contributor Daniel Gross and I seem to be thinking along the same lines, as we independently came to a similar response to his column of last week:

Last week, I wrote that the Republican claim that Obama is fighting a war against the rich was bogus. Over the weekend, I thought better of it. It turns out there is a war on the rich. Only it’s not being waged by vicious overlords in Washington intent on depriving honest, hardworking stiffs of their livelihoods. Rather, it’s a civil war, a war between the rich. It’s Park Avenue marauding through SoHo, Buckhead rampaging through Hilton Head, Palm Beach shelling Bal Harbour with the big cannons.

Call it the War Between the Estates.

While we both came to the conclusion that there is a battle going on amongst the rich, I came to a somewhat different conclusion about where to draw the lines in, as I wrote:

I realize that we are now observing a “Culture War” between the haves and the have mores, between the elites and the financial elites, between two opposing sides in the “overclass.”

Categories
National Security The War on Terrorism War on Drugs

The Rule of Law

I’m written quite a bit about the Rule of Law on this blog. I’ve come to see it as the cornerstone of my political views – this belief that, as Thomas Paine famously asserted in his Common Sense:

For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

This distinction – between the holder of power and the law – is one of the fundamental insights of our Founding Fathers – and one that the Bush administration treated with contempt – a contempt I am loathe to attribute to conservatives in general, but one which far too many for my comfort seem to share.

Protecting the Rule of Law is what I (along with Philip Bobbitt) propose that the Wars Against Terrorism must focus primarily on.

One of the primary reasons I believe the War on Drugs must end is to protect the Rule of Law.

My criticisms of the Bush administration’s War on Terror arise largely from their abuse of the Rule of Law – from asserting unchecked presidential authority to attempting to evade any laws by creating a prison in Guantanamo to flagrantly committing felonies even after being advised as such by the attorney general and FBI director.

I believe Bush’s War on Terror evolved all too quickly into a war on the Rule of Law itself, as one of the few remaining checks on presidential power. 

It is why I believe that men and women who knowingly attempted to undermine the Rule of Law, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent allowed by the law. 

Perhaps the reason I have been so attracted to this concept as a fundamental principle is that it is not an absolute one – but instead requires a balancing test. Rather than focusing on liberty or equality – both of which are important principles that must be balanced against other principles to avoid becoming the justification for great evils, the concept of the Rule of Law itself is a balancing test between anarchy and authoritarianism, between justice and legality, between what is needed and what can be done.

Categories
Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Culture War: Overclass Edition

[digg-reddit-me]In which I realize that we are now observing a “Culture War” between the haves and the have mores, between the elites and the financial elites, between two opposing sides in the “overclass.”

I’ve been a bit flummoxed by the class warfare rhetoric coming from certain quarters recently – and I don’t mean from the populists. As Daniel Gross observed in Slate:

To hear conservatives tell it, you’d think mobs of shiftless welfare moms were marauding through the streets of Greenwich and Palm Springs, lynching bankers and hedge-fund managers…

All of this overheated rhetoric is about – as Gross points out – Obama proposing to undo some of the changes of the past eight years – the largest change resulting in the wealthiest few paying about $4.10 more per day to benefit the society which has enabled them to become so wealthy. But I suspect that what Gross has gotten wrong here is what I’ve been getting wrong as well – to identify those opponents of Obama’s “Great Wealth Destruction!” as conservatives. Many of them are – and many conservatives are jumping on this meme as it is the only one that seems to have gained any traction against Obama’s agenda. But the meme hasn’t gained traction because conservatives are big proponents of fiscal responsibility. Supporters of the Republican party ceased to be proponents of fiscal responsibility years ago – and the measures they are proposing now (which would create even larger deficits than the stimulus spending) prove that they truly are out-of-touch or are merely posturing for political purposes. At the same time, non-conservatives like Clive Crook, who supports both health care reform and a cap-and-trade system, have begun to join in much of the conservative criticism. The real source of energy behind this line of attack doesn’t come from conservatives – but from a culture war going on between the financial elites and the rest of the elite which has been supercharged by the financial crisis. Everyone is angry about the great destruction of wealth that has resulted from this crisis – and the question has become where to place the blame, where to direct the still largely inchoate anger.

Matt Yglesias has been suggesting something like this type of distinction over at his blog. At one point, commenting on Jon Stewart’s takedown of CNBC, he wrote:

Comedy Central vs CNBC nicely captures the cultural battle inside the American elite between “creative class” types and the business manager types. Both sides think the other side is composed of idiots…

Then yesterday, Yglesias made a related point about how “the growing overclass revolt [is] taking the American right by storm.” Yglesias critically quotes Lisa Schriffen at National Review‘s The Corner:

The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied…

[Obama] is demonizing them… [and] is penalizing their success and giving them very clear incentives to ratchet back on productivity.

Yglesias’s response is to point out that not only is no one being demonized, and that:

Guys who move furniture are, of course, working extremely hard. And even your basic retail employee needs to be on her feet for hours and hours at a time while “executives” comfy chairs. And, again, I don’t think the Salvadoran guys who moved my bed found themselves in that line of work because they were too busy partying in college.

On one level, this is an argument about the fundamental fairness of the status quo – which conservatives tend to accept and liberals tend to reject. But on a more superficial level, we’re not talking so much about a “revolt of the overclass” as a culture war among the overclass – in which the argument is less about whether or not society and capitalism has been fair to “the Salvadoran guys” and more about whether or not society and capitalism have been fair to give the super-rich which so many riches. As this is a culture war, your side on it is not based on such petty facts as your income level or total net worth but by who you identify with. 

America has established something resembling a meritocracy among it’s upper and middle classes – as college education is accessible to most – and from there, any range of careers. This is the world Schriffen is referring to. But what Schriffen misses is the growing gap between the “haves” and the “have mores” – as the lawyers, doctors, and businessmen she lionizes realized that their college friends on Wall Street who were partying instead of studying in college were now making ten, twenty, a hundred times what they were – and still partying just as hard. This resentment has now been exacerbated as we realize that these Wall Street bankers – who have been working hard, partying hard, and making obscene amounts of money – lost all of our money but get to keep their bonuses.

In this culture war of the overclass, level of wealth doesn’t cause you necessarily to identify with either side. Warren Buffet for example would clearly be a member of the have mores, but he identifies with the haves and lives a lifestyle more suited to that group. There are those who identify as or who aspire to be “rich” and “wealthy” and who consider their good forture to be of their own making, who see the crisis as hurting them and their chances at achieving obscene wealth even if they do not have it yet. They tend to blame the crisis not on the bankers but on Obama – which is a bit odd considering the timing of his rise. But as early as September, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were talking about the Obama Recession and by January, the Wall Street Journal was opinining about it as a fact. Jim Cramer, along with some others at CNBC, decided to take on on the White House with “empirical facts”:

When I somewhat obviously and empirically judged that the populist Obama administration is exacerbating the crisis with its budget and policies, as evidenced by the incredible decline in the averages since his inauguration, I was met immediately with condescension and ridicule rather than constructive debate or even just benign dismissal. I said to myself, “What the heck? Are they really that blind to the Great Wealth Destruction they are causing with their decisions to demonize the bankers, raise taxes for the wealthy, advocate draconian cap-and-trade policies and upend the health care system? [my emphasis]

I think we can all understand why Jim Cramer is angry – he’s been telling people the system is fine and cheerleading the market – and now, he looks like a fool. You can see how people who listen to Cramer might be angry – as anyone listening to Cramer’s advice would be rather screwed. On the other hand, Cramer was merely a part of the system of the financial elites – and he wasn’t saying anything that different from what everyone else believe. The question for the financial elities is whether or not they are responsible for their woes as well as the world’s – or if they can lay the blame somewhere else.

On the other hand, there is the rest of the overclass – and much of the rest of America – who, so far, place the blame for this crisis squarely on the bankers, on the financial industry (whose purpose was to protect and make money), and on lax regulation often promoted by Limbaugh and Hannity and Cramer. The many for whom Wall Street is some half-mythical place to which they entrust their savings are certainly angry today – though the rage is still largely unformed and undirected. In spurts and starts, it is directed at lavish expenses indirectly subsidized by taxpayers – but largely, these people are just hoping things get better. The financial elites themselves see the anger – and know they are the logical target, and so seek to deflect it. For the non-financial members of the overclass who know many people on Wall Street – who are the haves to the Wall Street have mores – they know where to direct their anger – at those whose outsized success has made them look foolish for choosing anything other than a Wall Street career. It is part resentment and part righteous indignation.

Either way, this Culture War of the Overclass is more entertaining than that whole abortion/gay marriage culture war.

[Image licensed under Creative Commons courtesy of shyb.]