Tag: Matt Yglesias

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Barack Obama Gay Rights Politics War on Drugs

Obama Hasn’t Betrayed The Gay Rights Movement (Yet)

[digg-reddit-me] Or, In Quasi-Defense of Waiting

From The Colbert Report:

JIM FOURATT: I’m very troubled by Barack Obama because I think most gay and lesbian people in this country voted for Barack Obama and expected him to talk about our issues and he’s playing a classic liberal role. It’s always about just, “Wait, wait, wait…” We’re waiting and waiting and waiting and I’m quite frankly, as most people are, sick and tired of it. We expected Barack Obama to step up to the plate and do what is principled, to do what is right.

STEPHEN COLBERT: Why don’t you do the smart thing: If you’re tired of liberals saying one thing and then saying, “Wait, wait, wait,” when they get into office – why don’t you come over to the conservatives because we’re honest. We say, “No, no, no,” from the very beginning. Isn’t there something to be said for honesty?

JIM FOURATT: Actually, there is something to be said for that because [then] we know who our enemies are…It’s deeply troubling and I asked Cornell West about this…

STEPHEN COLBERT [Interrupting]: Brother West, he’s a friend of the show.

JIM FOURATT: He said that, “Barack Obama is wrong but he will come along.” I don’t know if Martin Luther King, what he would have said if someone said to him, “We’ll come along on your rights.” I don’t know about Rosa Parks, if she would have got off the bus and not sat down.

Frank Rich approvingly cites a gay activist who met with Obama in the White House this past week:

Chrisler seized the moment to appeal to the president on behalf of her boys. “The worst thing you can experience as parents is to feel your children are discriminated against,” she told him. “Imagine if you have to explain every day who your parents are and that they’re as real as every family is.” Chrisler said that she and her children “want a president who will make that go away,” adding, “I believe in his heart he wants that to happen, his political mistakes notwithstanding.” [my emphasis]

Jennifer Chrisler and Jim Fouratt clearly express the growing feeling of anger and even betrayal directed at Barack Obama from the LGBT community. They remember that Bill Clinton led them on, took their money and votes, and then created the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and passed the Defense of Marriage act which Obama’s Justice Department is now defending. Similarly, many opponents of the War on Drugs have become angry and disappointed that Obama has barely advanced their issues. Civil libertarians have been likewise disappointed by Obama’s use of the State Secrets Privilege, withholding of documents and photographs related to Bush administration torture, and other defenses and continuations of Bush-era executive aggrandizement.

I count myself as a supporter of the goals of all three groups. But I see the feelings of anger and betrayal directed against Barack Obama as nothing less than the result of naivete. As if electing Barack Obama president would solve any of these problems! As if a president is morally responsible for all things status quo! As if history and change were passed down from above – rather than bubbling up from below.

These feelings of betrayal are based on profound misunderstandings of the presidency and how change happens.

The President of the United States is not The Leader. He is merely a leader. George Will has quoted Calvin Coolidge on this general theme a few times recently:

It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.

Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, who many did consider a great man, had his own way of telling his constituencies the same message:

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.

The “cult of the presidency” is a source of moral rot in this nation. If you belive in an issue, fight for it! Don’t whine about being betrayed. There are better uses of your energy. More important, it reflects a misunderstanding of what the role of the president is.

As to citing figures from the Civil Rights era: Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King did wait – and wait, and wait for a president to act. And as they waited, they fought for what they believed in – without undue anger or inappropriate feelings to betrayal. They put pressure on Congress, on the White House, on state legislatures, on governors, on courts. And in each of these skirmishes they gained something. Until eventually their movement had achieved a momentum that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The fact is, the role of the activist and the role of the president are very different. To confuse the two as Fouratt does, and as many other activists do, doesn’t help anybody. The president, in having so much power, must have on goal above all – to protect the status quo. He or she can push reforms and changes and improvements – but their dreams must be constrained. The activist can dream of a new world – in which all things are vastly improved – and fight for it and demand it – and be right in doing so. But the president can say no, and be just as justified. For these are their roles. The goal of the activist must be to make the president do what he or she wants – to force them to make a decision which, taking into account political factors, is still an easy one. Abraham Lincoln was a great example of this – as abolitionists pressed for him to emancipate the slaves and go to war with the South but he firmly took an incrementalist position, only making such decisions as he was forced to.

There is a natural tension between the activist and the president because of their roles – but this tension can be productive if both sides understand how change happens. The presidency is an essentially reactive job, with the best presidents reacting with an eye towards achieving larger goals. The activist must provoke these reactions – and create favorable circumstances to shape all political actors’ responses to these actions. And while a president can force an issue or two through given the powers he or she exercises, this “forcing” creates problems and backlash. No president can make prejudice “go away” as Chrisler seems to be counting on. But the president can be expected to make a decision when it is thrust upon him or her. This is why it is important to have a president sympathetic to your aims.

As Matt Yglesias smartly observed:

Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has become a majoritarian position, but the Obama administration would still prefer to avoid the headaches involved in working to repeal it. At the same time, if a court case were toorder the administration to end this policy, it’s abundantly clear that there would be no critical mass of political support for trying to put it back in place.

In other words, for the activist, it never makes sense to wait; for the president, it almost always does. And both sides – even if they share the same goals – will conflict on strategy. That’s the way things are – and it is by understanding this dynamic that successful movements are built.

The gay rights movement does seem to understand this – Ted Olsen’s and David Boies’s lawsuit notwithstanding. This has been the source of it’s outstanding success – from a time within living memory when psychologists would diagnose “homosexuality” as a disease to today as six states recognize gay marriage. (David Sedaris was especially moving as he spoke of the progress in the past forty years on The Leonard Lopate Show.)  This is no time to abandon a successful strategy.

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Economics Financial Crisis Health care Iran Politics The Opinionsphere

Mirror Neurons, Iran’s Fissures, Yglesian Insights, The Deficit Crisis, Rare Minerals

Once again, it’s Friday, so it’s time for my weekend reading recommendations.

1. Mirror Neurons. Daniel Lametti explains the importance of mirror neurons in the Scientific American.

2. Iran’s Fissures. Roger Cohen has been prominently writing about Iran for the past year or so – predicting and pushing for a thaw in relations. Now, on the cusp of an important election, Roger Cohen discusses Iran:

Iran, its internal fissures exposed as never before, is teetering again on the brink of change. For months now, I’ve been urging another look at Iran, beyond dangerous demonization of it as a totalitarian state. Seldom has the country looked less like one than in these giddy June days.

3. Yglesian insights. Matt Yglesias’s blog has long been on my must-read list – but he’s offered some especially insightful observations in various contexts about the free market in recent weeks. Here Yglesias speculates about the advantages of non-profit-maximizing corporations in a free market:

After all, profit-maximization is not a natural form of human behavior. I think it’s best understood as a very idiosyncratic kind of pursuit. It happens to be one that’s economically rewarded because with money to invest tend to want to invest it with would-be profit-maximizers. Thus, in fields of endeavor where the ability to raise large sums of capital on reasonable terms is a huge advantage, a profit-maximization impulse winds up being a huge advantage.

In a later post about health care, Yglesias makes a related point:

[P]art of what’s wrong with the world is that the very same people who spend a lot of time cheerleading for free markets and donating money to institutions that cheerlead for free markets—businessmen, in other words—are the very people who have the most to gain from markets being totally dysfunctional. The absolute worst place on earth you can find yourself as a businessman is in the kind of free market you find in an Economics 101 textbook. As a market approaches textbook conditions—perfect competition, perfect information, etc.—real profits trend toward zero. You make your money by ensuring that textbook conditions don’t apply; that there are huge barriers to entry, massive problems with inattention, monopolistic corners to exploit, etc.

4. How to tackle the deficit crisis. Set off by David Leonhardt’s excellent look at the forthcoming deficit crisis, the Opinionsphere quickly took this up as a theme of the week. Noah Millman at The American Scene had the best take on how to tackle the deficit crisis – once we decide to get serious. One of the main ways he suggests is to reform the tax code:

We have an income tax that is riddled with deductions that undermine its purported progressivity, and we rely on increasingly steep progressivity to justify every additional change to said code. A 1986-style reform that eliminated many deductions and lowered rates would not only be a likely booster of the economy, but would probably raise revenue – certainly on the corporate side.

5. China’s Great Game. And of course, the Financial Times reported that China has almost cornered the world market in rare minerals needed for most high tech products. I’m looking forward to some analyst really following up on this and explaining what implications – if any – this has.

Categories
Conservativism Economics Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

The Limits of the Free Market

George Will:

Trillions of dollars of capital are being allocated sub-optimally, by politically tainted government calculations rather than by the economic rationality of markets. Hence the nation’s prospects for long-term robust growth – and for funding its teetering architecture of entitlements – are rapidly diminishing.

The president’s astonishing risk-taking satisfies the yearning of a presidency-fixated nation for a great man to solve its problems. But as Coolidge said, “It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man.” What the country needs today in order to shrink its problems is not presidential greatness. Rather, it needs individuals to do what they know they ought to do, and government to stop doing what it should know causes or prolongs problems.

One thing that has frustrated me greatly over the past months has been George Will’s apparently unshaken faith in the perfection of the free market. Here he demonstrates this again – speaking of the “sub-optimal” allocation of resources by the government. I have to wonder what he makes of how the financial sector allocated resources over the past few decades. At this point, I think most of us can appreciate the value of  “sub-optimal” investment when compared to the catastrophic investments the “free market” allowed.

It’s not that I don’t think Will has a point. For one, I tend to agree with his anti-royalist attitude towards the executive branch. And secondly, I agree with him that a free market, by distributing resources and power among many actors, can achieve a kind of collective wisdom – and by allowing constant tinkering and creative destruction we allow for the possibility of positive black swans. This is the genius of the market, rooted in the knowledge that no one person or team of persons can know enough to guarantee the right decision. Instead, the best results are obtained by creating many seperate decision-making bodies and creating a structure that allows those that are actually successful to be rewarded.

But Will doesn’t seem to have noticed the serious flaws in the American and worldwide market – or at least, the only flaws he seems to have noticed are those involving government interference.

[digg-reddit-me]Even in the most traditional analysis, bankers got into this crisis largely because they were able to escape regulation. They created shadow banks, derivative products, and other complex financial instruments which were designed to evade any regulations in place. George Will and others will likely point to government-backed organizations like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as key causes in inflating the housing bubble – but it is difficult to actually make this case – as these institutions, for their size, weren’t that involved in the subprime mortgage market – and in fact were pushed to become involved by the enormous profits being made by the banks. What Will doesn’t want to acknowledge was that even in this most traditional analysis, the root of the problem is the misalignment of incentives rather than government distortions of the market.

What Will fails to acknowledge is that our markets are constricted by lack of government interference. The freedom of the financial marketplace – especially the distribution of power and decision-making that makes the market work – is severely restricted by the size of our banks. Their size not only makes them too big to fail, it also prevents the market from being free.

Our financial and automobile industries have ended up combining the worst aspects of socialism and capitalism – without the benefits of either – and that is even before the government stepped in.

Think about it – the free market is effective because it prevents any small set of individuals from monopolizing decision-making. Especially in the world today with so much information available and events moving so quickly, the “right” business choices to make aren’t always clear. A free market – by allowing each business to make its own choice – prevents decision-making from falling victim to individual follies. But our current economic system – with it’s enormous corporations – ends up recreating the feudal system in which power is not centered in a single place, but in a handful of powerful “princes.” While these “princes” push for free market reforms, it is not in their interest to actually achieve this ideal free market – as Yglesias points out:

As a market approaches textbook conditions—perfect competition, perfect information, etc.—real profits trend toward zero. You make your money by ensuring that textbook conditions don’t apply; that there are huge barriers to entry, massive problems with inattention, monopolistic corners to exploit, etc.

George Will himself has pointed out that those “reforms” that are passed tend to be of a specific sort, following what Will calls, “the supreme law of the land…the principle of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.” What free market supporters rarely seem to admit is that the free market exists not in spite of the government, but because of it. And today, our market is far from free because the government has failed to protect it – and has instead allowed the worst characteristics of capitalism (exploitation of labor; externalizing as much cost to society as possible, for eg. pollution) with the worst characteristics of socialism (concentration of power and limitation of competition) to create a kind of modern feudal society. In  this feudal society, freedom is enjoyed by the “princes” of finance and industry while the creative ferment of a real free market is formally protected but effectively quashed.

I would like to see George Will take on the limitations of capitalism at some point. As a conservative and an intelligent man, he must see they exist.

[Image by mischiru licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

“Nobody’s going to wage a tough political battle to give up power.”

Yglesias makes a good point about the odd dynamic Republicans are creating on the national security front:

Part of why it’s so problematic for congressional Republicans to be so busy attacking the Obama administration as too hesitant to torture people and so forth is that the natural order of checks and balances is totally turned on its head when the opposition is urging the executive to seize more power and become less transparent. Nobody’s going to wage a tough political battle to give up power.

I’ve stated before that I believe it is primarily the job of the Courts and legislature – and even of individual citizens to the extent they are able – to provide a check on the Executive branch – as not only can one not expect a president to give up power – but for him to do so unilaterly serves to strengthen the power of the executive in the future. If the Courts or the Congress forces him or her to give up power, then the system of checks and balances is working – and the executive is seen to be subject to them in the future.

Categories
National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Irony Watch: Cheney on Euphemisms

From Yglesias:

Benjy Sarlin, over email: “Dick Cheney, who brought us the phrase ‘enhanced interrogation methods,’ is currently railing against those who use ‘euphemisms’ to obscure the debate over national security.”

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.]

Categories
Economics The Opinionsphere

The Battle of the Elites

Matt Yglesias has an interesting observation regarding Jon Stewart’s takedown of CNBC:

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, but their side is mistaken.

Categories
Barack Obama Financial Crisis Politics

Interpeting Obama’s Stimulus Strategy

Noam Scheiber at The Plank:

Barack Obama is nothing if not a master rope-a-doper. For months last year, anxious liberals pleaded with him to respond to John McCain’s lacerating attacks. And, for months, Obama soared above the fray. Then, in early September, the McCain campaign squeezed out two ludicrously dishonest ads—accusing Obama of force-feeding sex education to kindergarteners and of calling Sarah Palin a pig. The press screamed bloody murder—Joe Klein labeled the former “one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen;” Joy Behar of “The View” personally told McCain they were “lies.” At which point Obama saw an opportunity. With the media having pronounced McCain the aggressor and him the victim, Obama began to whale away—on healthcare, on McCain’s age, even Charles Keating—with virtual impunity.

My sense is that we’re seeing something similar play out with the stimulus.

Andrew Sullivan quotes one of his readers:

What many do not understand is that the government is playing for time, not some brilliant economic miracle. We do not have the money or political leverage to solve this problem from the top down by divine fiat. We have to buy time — literally — for the ten-thousand smaller acts of restoration and renewal to take place. All this flow of money, this vast seemingly indiscriminate transfusion of economic blood, has one purpose: to keep the patient’s heart pumping until the systemic crisis is past — another 6-12-18 months. It is messy, sloppy, gross heroic medicine.

Andrew Sullivan has his own just slightly less optimistic interpretation.

Yglesias points out some of what Obama is dealing with as Representative Steve Austria explains his opposition to Obama’s stimulus in historical terms:

“When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression,” Austria said. “He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.”

“That’s just history.” The article Yglesias cites points out the slight problem with this “history”:

Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Fair-Minded Yglesias

Matt Yglesias points out the inconsistency in Republican opponents of the stimulus bill claiming:

we can’t afford large new temporary deficit spending but can afford large new permanent tax cuts.

And then Yglesias points to “a Republican worth listening to,” Rep. John L. Mica.

It’s the fair-mindedness that keeps me reading Yglesias’s stuff.

Categories
Barack Obama Foreign Policy National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Why Liberals Must Embrace the Wars Against Terrorism

[digg-reddit-me]Sun Tzu in The Art of War:

Hence the saying: If you know the enemy
and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will
succumb in every battle.

In the past week, the idea that America should “get rid of the ‘War on Terror’ mindset”  has enjoyed a resurgence. With Barack Obama’s rolling back some of the blunders of the Bush administration’s ill-fated War on Terror, liberals who have been bludgeoned with the term, ‘War on Terror’ in election after election want it retired. Surprisingly few voices have called for the Democrats to appropriate the term as a partisan weapon against the Republicans as it was used against them – which indicates the seriousness with which these liberals take retiring the term. For them, ‘War on Terror’ has become associated not only with political attacks on any criticism of the Bush administration but with the bevy of emergency measures taken by the administration in the panicked aftermath of September 11 – and then institutionalized as policy afterward. Many of these measures were ill-considered and counterproductive – and the fight over them has distracted the country from reevaluating our defense posture in light of the threat of strategic terrorism.

From when Sir Michael Howard first made the case to treat terrorism as a law enforcement matter and ditch the war posturing in 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine to Matt Yglesias’s short sketch in The American Prospect last week, the argument has been substantially the same. It is certainly not weakened by the fact that the main critiques it makes cannot be reasonably disputed.

In summary, the critics of the term ‘War on Terror’ make the point that this war does not fit our traditional definition of war; that because it does not, it makes it seem like the metaphorical wars on drugs or poverty; that it ennobles terrorists as warriors instead of mere murderers and criminals; that declaring war on terror leads us to conflate our enemies and even confuse them – when in fact they have separate and competing agendas; that by using the term war without the prospect of victory, we are setting ourselves up for a failure; that as this war is without a foreseeable end, we risk permanently giving up those liberties that are traditionally infringed upon during war. Already, this War on Terror has lasted longer than any war in American history – and yet victory is nowhere in sight. In related points, critics of the term point out that terrorists have launched attacks on numerous societies in the past – and these societies have been more successful when they responded with law enforcement than with military force, for, as Lawrence Wright explains in The Looming Tower:

The usual object of terror is to draw one’s opponent into repressive blunders…

In the past seven years, we have not avoided the pitfalls that have historically accompanied a state response to terrorism. We have not learned from the history and experience of other nations that informs the views of the liberal critics of the terms.

Yet it should be admitted that the term has been accepted by the greatest majority of Americans – and in the aftermath of September 11, it seemed clear to me – as well as to many others – that this was somehow different. It wasn’t just the scale of the damage that was shocking; it was the deliberation involved in planning the attack. As more information became public – as it became clear that this attack was in development for years, that it had required hundreds of thousands of dollars to organize; that it’s goals were not the mundane extortion of 20th century terrorism (Free this prisoner! Give us our own state!) – but a long-term strategic plan to reorganize the world – as all this became clear, we knew it was something different. Worse – our society is more vulnerable to attack today then it was even a decade ago. Biological technology is advancing rapidly – and soon, if not already, biological weapons will be acquired by terrorists. There is a black market is weapons of mass destruction – including nuclear weaponry thanks to Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan. Large numbers of people travel the world and international borders have become porous. At the same time, our society is becoming more and more concentrated as people pack into already denseley populated cities. The markets that control an ever expanding portion of our society are especially vulnerable to the effects of terrorism – both the fear that it elicits and the government intrusion that comes in reaction.

These vulnerabilities coupled with the opportunities to create havoc which are more democratically available than ever mean that the threat of terrorism truly is a threat to our way of life. At the same time, these terrorists are no mere criminals – whose activities while damaging to society are manageable and who can be deterred with punitive measures. Suicide terrorists seek death – and even are willing to be given capital punishment, considering it martyrdom, as the Khalid Sheikh Muhammad has said.

For the past seven years, we avoided the needed-re-thinking of our approach to terrorism, as under Karl Rove’s guidance, our response to terrorism became yet another front in the culture wars; as under Dick Cheney’s influence with his poisonous One Percent Doctrine, he ensured that our nation stayed the course set in the panic of September 2001, justifying every misstep as an essential part of a ‘strategy’ to combat terrorism that never materialized. ‘We will fight them over there so we do not need to fight them over here,’ it was said – as if our enemy were a fixed group which we could eliminate like our enemies in conflicts past. The Bush administration could never bring itself to acknowledge that Al Qaeda was a stateless organization – and Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush were certain that Iraq must be somehow behind it all. But the threat of September 11 did not emanate from a state although it did have a temporary home in Afghanistan. We conflated and confused our enemies – presuming they formed a united front when in fact they consisted of squabbling groups, or in other cases, mortal enemies – and we did our best to unite them, treating them as one entity.

Although it is not fashionable today to say anything in praise of Donald Rumsfeld given his mismanagement of the Defense Department, by October 2003, he was asking the tough but necessary questions:

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists’ costs of millions.

Five years later, and we still do not have answers to these questions or a long-range plan for what the military has come to call the Long War. It is left to Obama then to forge a new legal and strategic framework to deal with this threat to our way of life. (Which should be easy as he must also attempt to patch together a new financial and economic world order at the same time.)

In the past seven years, liberals have tended to think of terrorism as an ever-receding threat. Certainly, the fear in the days and months after September 11 have proved to be inflated. And it is clear that Al Qaeda does not pose a threat to our nation in the way that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union did. But Al Qaeda in particular – and strategic terrorism generally – does pose an existential threat to our way of life. By disrupting our markets, by prompting government repression. Our way of life is based on transparency, the rule of law, the free flow of goods, information, and people around the world, and technological advances – all of which are undermined both by terrorism and ordinary counterterrorism and war measures.

Which is why as liberals, we must – both out of political necessity and good sense – embrace some version of a war against terrorism and come to terms with the threat from strategic terrorism, especially when coupled with weapons of mass destruction, to our way of life. We must build a society and a structure of laws that will withstand another attack. Or we will lose.

A law enforcement approach is not sufficient to combat this threat. Nor is the hodge-podge of measures taken by the Bush administration. Nor would a traditional war. What is required is a serious look at who our enemy is and who we are. Without this knowledge, we will lose this war, whether we call it one or not. ((This entire piece is greatly indebted to Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent.))