The Third Estate

The Republicans Are Trying To Make Me Look Stupid At The Office

2012-02-15T12:46:00.003-05:00

I'm generally pretty good at handicapping political races, having watched them and participated in them for (gasp) decades. Like many elections scholars, every four years I become the most popular person at work as everybody seeks me out to ask what I think of the presidential race. This year, however, the Republicans have repeatedly forced me to apologize for my errors. Now perhaps I needed a little lesson in humility, but this is getting ridiculous. It's as if the Republican primary electorate has decided that their chief goal is not electing a president but embarrassing political scientists.

Honestly, I don't pretend to understand Republicans, but I have to say I've never had to scratch my head more over a race than this one. Much like the 2008 race, I looked at it and figured that none of them could possibly be the nominee, so the one with the most establishment support looked like the safest bet. Then Perry got in and, not realizing that Texas would re-elect a buffoon so many times, figured he was a reasonably competent politician and as the logical choice for conservatives would in all probability be the nominee - which I proceeded to tell people. Of course, it turns out that Texas will repeatedly put a half-trained mentally handicapped lemur in their highest office. Apology #1. Then I figured "oh well, back to Romney. This'll be over sometime in February." Romney "wins" Iowa, wins New Hampshire and looks to be cruising. Then he loses to Newt in South Carolina, and knowing Newt as I do, it was pretty clear that Romney would pulverize Gingrich in Florida and that would be that. I told people that Romney would win Florida, and he did, and I casually pronounced the Republican nomination race over.

I've avoided the subject since Santorum's wins last week. Delegate free they may be, they were an indication that Romney was the medicine the patient just keeps spitting back up, no matter how many ways the doctors explain the necessity for it. Now Santorum is leading in the national polls, and more importantly, leading in Michigan, one of Romney's many purported home states (along with Utah, Massachusetts, and France). If Santorum wins Michigan, I will throw up my hands in exasperation and forever disclaim any future prognosticating on Republican intraparty scrums. Of course, I will also have the glee of watching the Republican Party establishment have a complete nervous breakdown.

Thinking over this nomination contest, I have decided that - thus far - the closest comparison isn't the Republicans in 2008 or the Democrats in 1984, the two most commonly cited references. No, I'm starting to think the right precedent is the 1980 Democratic nomination. Carter wasn't particularly well liked by Democrats, although they knew that they were probably stuck with him. They didn't really want Ted Kennedy either, but as long as they thought there was no chance Kennedy would actually unseat Carter, the Democrats were happy to use Ted as a protest vehicle. Until that is Kennedy won enough seats to look like he might strip Carter of the nomination after all, at which point they turned on him. Or at least this is my understanding of what happened that year. So, very tentatively, I think that Romney is Carter, and Santorum has been cast in the role of Kennedy now that Gingrich has proved so loathsome even the Republicans can't stomach him.

Having said that, I could be entirely wrong. Again. Which now that I think about it shouldn't be much of surprise. After all, to have a grasp of how Republican wingnuts make decisions I'd have to have at least a little empathy for them. Which I don't.

Valentine's Day

2012-02-14T07:22:00.001-05:00

I don't care if it was invented by hallmark. I like it anyway. Here's hoping you have an embarrassingly sweet one.

Frustrations with Politics

2012-02-03T07:22:00.004-05:00

I'm sure part of it has to be do with losing the last race I was working on under very disappointing circumstances, and the fact that the national political context is more discouraging than ever (conservative policies wreck the country and the electorate's political response is to move...right?), but it's been difficult to summon up the enthusiasm about politics that I usually do. Yes, yes, I know I do quite a bit of bitching and moaning on this blog, but that's mainly because I need to vent and my wife is sick of hearing about it. Hopefully it will get better as the 2012 cycle revs up locally. It really is a lot more fun to get involved in lower-level races than all that gargantuan national stuff. You can really see how your input makes a difference.

Having said that, there are three things on the internets from the last couple of days I think require some commentary.

First, with regards to the Komen kerfuffle, I think Twisty Faster really does have the last word on the topic. As usual.

Second, via Andrew Sullivan, the fantastically overrated Francis Fukuyama is trotting out the argument that America's governance problems stem from its democracy preceding bureaucratization, thus fostering a populism that cripples popular support for government. The first time I heard this claim I thought it had some prima facie validity, until one reflects that that the whatever speculative effects that early democratization might have had on American political developments, there are far more straightforward distinctions between the US and other wealthy democratic countries. Say, how about the combination of a constitution with an excessive number of veto points together with the legacy of regionally concentrated race-based chattel slavery? Does it seem possible that the "governance" problem that the US faces isn't some generic hostility to bureaucracy so much as that 1) elites in one large region of the country have a wonderful weapon with which to divide the plebs and to associate the welfare state with subsidies for the loathed "other", and 2) that regional hegemony allows them to block any and all left-wing reforms? The principal problem that America faces isn't that Americans are suspicious of government, it's that the ideological successors of John C. Calhoun are bent on fleecing the American middle class on behalf of their corporate masters, while their milquetoast opponents either are too corrupt or too clueless to stop them. Just a thought.

Finally, stories like this remind me of the old argument for property qualifications for voting. The idea was that you had to restrict the franchise to the self-employed because wage-earners would be to easily pressured to go along with their employers in politics - that wage-earners aren't truly independent. Now obviously I think that restricting voting rights on almost any grounds in repugnant, but I do think we need to do a much better job at making sure that the majority of us that are dependent on the goodwill of someone else to keep our jobs don't have to worry about our employers leveraging their position to influence our behavior outside of work. So for example, I don't answer the phone or respond to emails from work on the weekend or at night - cause I'm off duty, dammit. And y'know, unions.

The Problem With Neglecting Political Economy

2012-01-25T15:19:00.002-05:00

One of the more frustrating things about contemporary economics, and of the left-tinged types like Matt Yglesias who are influenced by neoliberal economics, is the total neglect of political economy. There is a very, very old tradition linking the structure of the economy, and in particular the distribution of wealth, to the system of politics. In short, extreme distributions of wealth tend to result in extreme distributions of power, and hence oligarchic politics. This means that if you want to have a popular government, you need to pay very close attention to developments in the economy - which is why one of my earliest posts was on the importance of preserving small businesses and labor unions as bastions of stable democratic politics.

So I'm happy to see that Matt is at least willing to entertain the idea that there might be some problems with the domination of the economy by huge international corporations totally indifferent to the needs of human beings. Gee, Matt, do you think maybe the growing concentration of wealth and the assault of our quality of life might be linked somehow?

So The Founders Really Did Sound Like Americans?

2012-01-15T07:54:00.003-05:00

A common criticism of movies set during the American Revolution is that the rebels should have spoken with British accents, not American ones. Well according to this guy, apparently it's the British whose accents have changed.

Advice to Social Scientists (And Especially Economists)

2012-01-14T16:43:00.002-05:00

"...it is the mark of a trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject allows; for demanding logical demonstrations from a teacher of rhetoric is clearly about as reasonable as accepting mere plausibility from a mathematician."

Aristotle, the Ethics.

The Era of Data

2012-01-12T16:50:00.002-05:00

I just downloaded detailed data on close to 20,000 governmental subunits from a federal government website in less then ten minutes, in a simple, easy-to-use spreadsheet.

Empirical researchers just entering grad school these days have no idea how lucky they are. Well, except for there being no jobs, of course.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T06:57:00.003-05:00

Jill at Feministe pretty much sums up how I feel about the death of Christopher Hitchens. One of the most brilliant polemicists of the era, I loved reading his words even when I hated the ideas they expressed. His role in public debate reminds me very much of the epitaph of the ancient Roman Lucius Cornelius Sulla: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy.

A Particulary Egregious Example of the Double Standard

2011-12-15T18:47:00.003-05:00

In case you haven't heard, Andrew Sullivan recently linked to the story of a woman who, both for health reasons and through lack of inclination to reproduce, decided to make herself infertile. Outrageously, this adult, well-educated, fully-informed woman's decision was not treated as an adequate justification for carrying out the procedure - at least as far as her doctors were concerned. Deciding that she just couldn't possibly know what she was doing, they refused to perform the surgery. Evidently her doctors - all male - just couldn't comprehend that a person would want to have children, even at the risk of their lives. It was only when she found a female surgeon that she got the help she needed.

My first reaction upon reading this story was stunned disbelief, then outrage, and finally outright disgust at this oh-so-typical example of condescending patriarchy. You see, I know for a fact that when men decide to forego children they don't encounter anything like the sort of obstacles bedeviling the woman in this situation.

And now for a bit of personal history. My wonderful spouse and I decided some time ago not to have children. When we first got married, I was leaning in the direction of wanting them, and she was leaning in the direction of not wanting them. As the years progressed she became more convinced than ever that she wished to remain child-free, and I gradually realized that I wasn't all that thrilled about having children after all. Yes, I like children. I just like giving them back when I'm done playing with them, much like I do with the neighbor's puppy. Upon reflection I think many people simply assume that they will have children, in no small part through social conditioning, and the notion that someone chooses not to reproduce just doesn't seem possible. That is until one day you realize "Hey wait, this is the 21st century! I don't have to have babies if I don't want them." And when coupled with the fact that if I was the one expected to carry a child to term I would politely deline (eww!), I was quite content to remain child-free.

My spouse and I decided to wait until we turned 35, and if that point neither of us had experienced the oft-referenced biological clock, then I would get a vasectomy. There is some fear that long-term use of female birth control among women over 35 can have undesirable health effects, and a vasectomy is a far simpler and less invasive procedure than comparable surgery a woman would have to endure. I've had abdominal surgery, and it was no fun - no point on inflicting it on BH for no good reason.

I asked my (female) doctor for a referral, and soon had an appointment with a specialist. At first they just assumed that I already had children and was done, but even when I explained that I had no children and didn't want any, the most I had to endure were a few irritating questions about how sure I was. However annoying these trifling notes of concern were, not for an instant did I fear that they wouldn't perform the procedure. In fact, if memory serves, the total time from the referral to the operation was something less than a month. I had a day of bedrest afterwards, and then returned to my regularly scheduled life. It was no big deal, and the only time I think about it is when I get the delight of shamelessly dropping it into casual conversation. Of regrets I have none.

My decision was one of pure choice, with no considerations of personal health, such as the anonymous woman in the story. Yet still no one tried to stop me from going through with it. When a woman tries to make the same decision she gets nothing but shit for it.

Which tells you all you need to know about the supposed end of sexism in America.

Why I Hate Comcast

2011-12-03T00:52:00.002-05:00

All I wanted was to watch this stupid Eddie Murphy "Party all the time" video from the 1980's at 1 AM on a Friday night. This should not take 30 minutes to load.

A few days after Thanksgiving

2011-11-30T22:25:00.003-05:00

And I'm trying to figure out what to be thankful about. It's not that there aren't good things in my life. Things are fairly good, actually - I think I've finally found my footing at work, my next novel is beginning to take shape, I'm learning the piano, and my wonderful spouse has decided to take up the drums and roller derby. All and all not a bad time.

Yet then there's the world. I look at it, and I'm just not sure what to say anymore.

WaPo Actually Reports Some News

2011-11-14T07:11:00.003-05:00

The Washington Post is usually pretty solidly behind neoliberal education reforms, so it's nice to see them highlight a report questioning the research basis for many of those policies.

Some Things Never Change

2011-11-11T14:46:00.001-05:00

"Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is... stigmatized as socialism."

-Karl Marx in "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", 1852

Monsters

2011-11-10T07:03:00.003-05:00

Demonstrating in favor of a man who was fired for protecting a child rapist is....is....I don't even have a word for how awful it is.

A Little More Than An Homage

2011-11-06T17:36:00.002-05:00

So I of course forgot an important ingredient for the dinner I'm making tonight and had to head back to the grocery store. I turn on the radio, and begin to hear what I suspect is a cover of a song by the Pixies. Then it turns out not to be a cover at all, but rather a "new" song called Aberdeen by some group called "Cage the Elephant."

When I got home I googled "aberdeen pixies ripoff" and got this review. Now I love the Pixies, and think it's great to pay homage to them, such as Nirvana did with "Smells Like Teen Spirit." But man, this song is NOT an homage. Or if it is, Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" is an homage too.

Hey, if you don't believe me, check out this mashup.

Now I will go cook dinner and listen to an actual Pixies album to get the taste of felony out of my skull.

Thank God They Can't Do This

2011-11-04T16:31:00.002-04:00

Cats texting. Nothing more to be said.

Our Representative Democracy

2011-11-03T12:44:00.002-04:00

And I'm sure the fact that they're soooooo much richer than their constituents has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the policies they vote for. (h/t) I mean, it's not like really wealthy people don't have any sympathy for the little guy, right?

Totally Awesome Idea

2011-11-02T06:49:00.001-04:00

Irritate a financial institution: Send back the credit card applications!

On The 1%

2011-10-28T16:42:00.001-04:00

Or more specifically, with respect to their children:

"Anyone who grows up from childhood with unearned distinctions is bound to become conceited and self-congratulatory about them, this being the worst sort of pride. . . ."

-John Stuart Mill

X'ers and Millenials

2011-10-26T11:04:00.004-04:00

After posting the very amusing "Gen X says" a few days ago, I learn that Gen X'ers are apparently happy people (?), and am also reminded that we X'ers have quite a lot in common with the Millenials. At the end of the day, however much their sense of entitlement might annoy me, I think Amanda Marcotte is right: the Millenials are our little brothers and sisters. They've got our backs in what matters. I would like to go one step further than she did, though, and argue that as we're a little older and more experienced, we should take that status seriously and actually lead them. After all, we've got more money and are old enough to run for public office.

Ordinary Muslim Man

2011-10-25T16:20:00.002-04:00

Check it out.

The jokes get a bit repetitive after a while, but still, hilarious. A lot of them would make fantastic t-shirts.

Generation X Speaks

2011-10-21T16:34:00.001-04:00

Here.

(h/t)

Never Again!

2011-10-21T10:11:00.003-04:00

My background in statistics isn't as strong as it should be. As a consequence I tend to be very insecure when working on quantitative projects, doing a lot of research and trying to figure out what assumptions I might be violating and how to fix them. When I really feel out of my depth I've taken to going to university-sponsored statistical consulting centers, hoping they'd be able to a) understand my problem, and b) propose a workable solution.

Unfortunately, not once has one of these centers been very helpful. I walk away each time persuaded that these grad students know less about statistics than I do. Today was the worst example. I'm trying to compare logistic regression coefficients across groups and know for a fact that you can't use t-tests for reasons I won't go into. When I met with said grad student he told me to use....t-tests.

So this is the last time I'm going to a stats consulting center. However spotty my statistics training is, at least I know when I don't know something.

Music

2011-10-20T08:46:00.003-04:00

It's been a long time since a band made me remember what it's like to really care about pop music. I don't care how hipster they are - I love this group. When I play one of their albums I feel like I'm communing directly with my 17-year-old self.

Hmm. Maybe that's not a good thing.

Sometimes Dramatic Historical Events Are Perfectly Mundane

2011-09-27T21:39:00.004-04:00

OMG! It's a miracle! In 1948 the country was at peace, the economy was growing, real disposable income was rising, and the incumbent president was re-elected! It's a miracle!

Sometimes I hate popular historians.

I Suppose I'm A Novelist Now

2011-09-26T09:05:00.002-04:00

If one's definition of being a novelist includes "writing a complete novel" and then " starting another one the next day." No I'm not published. No my first novel isn't fully polished, or even ready to be disseminated. There's still quite a bit of editing to do, and I've decided to let it sit a while so I can take a fresh look at it in a few months.

But I did it. It took two long, often frustrating two years, but I have a completed story. No matter what, I won't be one of those people with a half-finished novel sitting in a trunk in the attic.

Obama Discovers Populism and Common Sense, Yay!

2011-09-19T13:43:00.002-04:00

Or so everybody seems to think. Pardon me for being cynical, but I believe this more likely explanation is that Obama is just saying all of these things to rally his base and try to get re-elected. Once he is, I suspect he'll go right back to pursuing the neoliberal policies he was pushing before. You know, like every other Democratic president has done over the last generation.

It's frustrating that it's so difficult for people to realize that most candidates for national office, Democratic OR Republican, campaign to their left and govern to their right. We need to start holding these people accountable after they're elected. I don't care what Obama says - I care what he's done.

I feel this way all the time.

2011-09-19T08:41:00.000-04:00

Underlying Political Dynamics

2011-09-14T08:53:00.003-04:00

All other things being equal, the underlying political environment determines elections. Which means that 2012 is looking like it's going to be ugly ugly ugly.

Eulogy for a Friend

2011-08-29T09:37:00.000-04:00

My cat Loki died on Friday. It took me several days to pull myself together sufficiently to write this small eulogy for him. I've lost other pets before, but none of them has left quite the hole that Loki's passing has.

We were together for fourteen years. I first met him when I was a graduate student. I'd grown up with cats, but hadn't had one for several years while I was in college. My roommate at the time had a very friendly cat and I'd realized how much I missed having one around. So when she finished school and moved out I starting thinking seriously about getting one myself. Word must have gotten out in the feline community, because in a very short time I had a starving, swollen-bellied, ear-mite and flea-infested, very ugly orange tabby kitten at my door demanding to be let in.

I knew right away I was going to keep him, assuming he survived. The vet said that he was an undersized six-month old, had probably been on his own for quite awhile, and was surprised he was still alive. This would become a theme with Loki - he was an exceptionally tough, strong-willed animal. I knew after the first night what his name was going to be, since I didn't sleep a wink. He circled my bed like a shark yipping and howling, and when I grabbed him and picked him up he wriggled away and started up again. He was very busy, you see.

Those first few months were...difficult. I actually have had worse-behaved cats, but Loki had a particular willfulness about his misbehavior. He just refused to learn, or to accept discipline. Once he'd decided that something was fun, was going to be a part of his repertoire, there just wasn't any dissuading him. For a long time his favorite game was finding a flat surface and slowing pushing things off, watching them fall. It looked very much like he was trying to figure out how gravity worked. Once everything was on the floor and the table or whatever was totally cleared, he'd stretch out to his full length in a victory stretch. After about 5 minutes he would get bored and look for something else to do, like maybe lick the top off a freshly cooked pie. Loki's true love was water, however. He absolutely loved lounging in the sink, would knock over water glasses if you left them alone for more than a moment or two. When I got married I discovered that his water obsession knew absolutely no limits - BH actually dunked him in her bath a few times, and afterwards he would howl or paw at the door wanting to be let in.

I could tell hundreds of similar, strange or funny little stories about Loki: how he bossed the other cats around mercilessly, or made a funny yipping noise whenever he was doing something he knew he wasn't supposed to. I think you get the idea. But what's important to know about Loki is that as challenging as he was, he was also my friend. When I got him I was in a very dark place, lonely and unsure about the future, and although it was years before he was comfortable with cuddling with me (and never was much of a lap cat), he would always hang around whatever room I was in. We were a team. He was kind of my id.

The last year has been hard. His decline was evident, with one medical problem after another. He'd rallied from his most recent difficulties, but you could tell he was frustrated by his inability to do all the naughty things he was used to. A great jumper, he'd lost that spring and couldn't get onto the kitchen counter as easily as he once did. But he was still the same cat, still keeping all the other animals - and humans - in line. I joked that he was going to live another seven years or so, ending up as one of those elderly cats with two legs and hooked up to an IV. Too mean to die, you see.

Last Tuesday something went wrong. He was having trouble breathing, and it had gotten worse by the time we got home. We took him to his vet, who when she ran out of ideas sent us to the vet research hospital on campus. It took them three days and a battery of tests to finally figure out that his right lung had collapsed, although even then they weren't entirely sure why. We're still waiting to hear for sure, but apparently he had a calcified lung, something that took a long time to develop. That's how tough Loki was - he was running around the house raising hell with half a lung.

We could have given him surgery to remove the bad lung. He had a chance, might have made it. But the surgery would have been traumatic, he could have died during it, the recovery would have been long and painful, and he might not have fully recovered. I couldn't do that to Loki, put him through such pain for so little return. The vet took pity on us and let us take Loki home for the night. For a few hours I thought Loki might shock the world - he was running up and down the stairs, checking everything out, letting everybody know he was still in charge. But that night he slept against me, which was strange for him, and the next morning was struggling, laboring for each breath. He gave me that look, that tired, sad, look that I'd never seen on his face before. I knew he was done. On the ride to the hospital he rested his head against my hand. I knew he was saying goodbye.

It took all weekend to get over the worst of the grief, to be sure that I could write this without blubbering (I was wrong of course). I suppose all I can say, all you can really say in a time like this, is that I know intellectually that things will get better, that I'll miss him a little less, that the house will seem less empty one day. For now though it's hard to believe it.

Loki was the best pet I ever had. He was an asshole, but he was my asshole. I very much doubt there will ever be another like him.

Looking towards 2012

2011-08-19T11:19:00.002-04:00

Not to be a killjoy, but I'm gradually coming around to the opinion that the Republicans are just as fated to win the 2012 election as the Democrats were the 2008 election. I remember spending most of 2008 assuring everyone that the fundamentals were so biased in favor of the Democrats that it pretty much didn't matter who they nominated - the election was in the bag. Now I'm seeing a pretty much mirror image of 2008.

Look at this way: the two likely nominees for the Republicans are Rick Perry and Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney would probably kill Obama in an election, but it's difficult to see how he defeats a credible candidate in the Republican primaries. As long as Perry doesn't self-destruct, I think he's pretty much a shoo-in to be the nominee. Now Perry will lose a bunch of moderate/swing voters, sure, but what people don't realize is that people like that only make up 5-10% of the voters. Given how mobilized I expect the Republicans to be, and how demotivated I expect the Democrats to be (thank Obama), it's hard to see how Perry loses enough votes to cost him the election. Unless the economy magically turns around, and I don't see how it will, we're going to get creamed next year.

The only way to stop somebody like Perry is to do what Harry Reid did to Sharron Angle. The problem is that Perry isn't the Angle of this race - Michelle Bachman is. Sure, Perry has radical views on lots of subjects, but to fully exploit them you'd need a concerted, aggressive, and utterly ruthless negative campaign. Now tell me, do you really think Obama is the kind of politician to run that sort of race? If so, why didn't he do it against the Republicans in 2010? Or for that matter in 2009?

So I think that the best bet in 2012 is the election of a hard-right Republican President with a hard-right Republican Senate and a hard-right Republican House. Wheeee.

That Can't Be Right

2011-08-12T13:41:00.002-04:00

Matt Yglesias presented a bit of trivia based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, pointing to a positive correlation between education and alcohol consumption. I wish I could truthfully say that my first thought on the seeing the chart was "surely education is serving as a proxy for income." Alas, what I was really thinking was "wait, who only spends $600 a year on booze? The survey respondents are fibbing!"

Whose Fault Is This Mess?

2011-08-04T15:27:00.003-04:00

Continuing my diatribes regarding the debt ceiling deal........

Last time I promised to announce who I thought bore responsibility for our current situation. Well, at first glance there is plenty of blame to go around - political history and the general trajectory of events, conservative intransigence, democratic timidity - these have all been building for a long time. But in the final analysis I'm not a historical determinist. The objective situation may constrain the behavior of the actors, but they still have scope for action. So ultimately I guess I do blame Obama. If not the ultimate cause of the disaster, he's certainly the efficient cause. Whether he's corrupt, evil, weak, naive, or whatever, doesn't really matter. He came into office with the best hand that any Democrat has had in 40 years - majorities in the House and Senate, a discredited opposition, a united and enthusiastic party, and a country eager for a new direction. He faced a pressing set of institutional crises, in the economy, in foreign policy, in the environment, and most of all in our political institutions. So with a huge pile of chips in the pot and a full house in his hands, what's he do? He folds to a pair of twos. Sometimes it's irresponsible NOT to gamble.

I think Rude Pundit has it about right: asking ourselves why Obama did this or why he did that is a big fat waste of time. Obama was supposed to be our leader, and we waited for him to lead us, and that was probably our mistake. The elected officials in democracies aren't supposed to be leaders, not even (maybe most especially) not the President. They aren't our friends. They aren't our bosses. They're our employees. Rude Pundit wrote a great Dear John Letter, while I think the better analogy is the Notice of Termination. We hired the man to do a particular job which, for whatever reason, he has been unwilling or able to do. Time to move on.

So what now? There are lots of people seriously asking whether the debacle of the Obama presidency raises questions about the value of supporting the Democratic Party. Tim Duy (via Economist's View), Oliver Willis, and Matt Taibbi all ask what the point is if voting for the Donkeys only results in conservative policies. Really it's worse than that. For most people Obama IS liberalism. You laugh, but that's the perception. So for most Americans, liberalism now means cuts to Medicare, national surveillance, wars, Wall Street bailouts, etc. You know, all the things we're against. So Obama's presidency has been much worse than just more counterproductive incrementalism. It's been a betrayal of the legacy of more than a century of struggle for a more just America.

My principle with respect to conservatism is simple: You can't make deals with the devil. Their aim is to overturn the twentieth century, to create a hierarchical society in which everyone knows their place (under their boot). Turning the other cheek will only encourage them.

We need to disenthrall ourselves from our identification of liberalism with the Democratic Party. Liberalism didn't succeed because Democrats gave us what we wanted - we took it. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop working in Democratic Party politics. Flawed as they are, they're the only game in town. What it does mean, however, is that I and everyone else has to be lot readier than we have been to call bullshit. It also means that when we push an agenda, it has to be about a lot more than our own pet policy. Conservatism has been so successful in unraveling the New Deal in large measure due to the fact that their assault has been structural. Breaking unions, de-funding the welfare state, expanding the role of money in politics, suppressing voter turnout, and yes, encouraging suburban sprawl all please their supporters, but they also undermine the ability of the Democratic Party to function. It is long, long past time we start to respond in kind.

This isn't a little tussle over what team of officeholders gets to hand out the goodies. Quite frankly, it's them or us. It always has been.

Quote For The Day

2011-08-02T16:34:00.000-04:00

"...it should now be clear that 'libertarian' capitalism sacrifices liberty to capitalism, a truth its advocates are able to deny only because they are prepared to abuse the language of freedom."

- Gerald Cohen

Post-Mortems

2011-08-02T13:08:00.005-04:00

I decided to take a day to cool off after the debt ceiling deal was announced, and in part just in case there were any last-minute surprises. Rest assured, I have been paying very close attention to the debt ceiling debacle.

First, off the results of this process have been little short of catastrophic. The economy is going to suffer from these cuts, with what EPI is estimating 1.8 million job losses. If that happens, we can expect the deficit to continue to increase. Yes, cutting government spending in a depressed economy in order to shrink the deficit is self-defeating.

The political process has also suffered. Ianqui is by no means alone in her disgust, but the problem goes deeper than that. Mitch McConnell has stated that in the future all increases in the debt ceiling will be matched with spending cuts - so unless there is a major change in direction, right-wing austerity politics will become institutionalized. Further, the creation of the "Super Congress" is going to continue to diminish the role of the Congress, with a consequent loss in public accountability, in what Sandy Levinson has called "delegation run riot." Now Brad Delong is speculating that debt ceiling votes will move us further towards a Congress-centered parliamentary system, but I think he's operating on the assumption that Democrats will return the favor to Republican Presidents. If that was the case, of course, no Democrats would have voted for the final package - and they most certainly did. No, this is a deal that will legally rule out progressive policies. That is its explicit purpose. Just as the Teabaggers.

The damage to the Democratic Party is obvious. Obama has further alienated liberals, and has put the Democrats in a permanently bad negotiating posture. So he's demotivated his base, weakened the economy heading into an election, made himself look weak, and emboldened his opponents. Nice work, Barry.

So who's to blame? There are a couple of schools of thought related to Obama. There's the "Obama is a bad negotiator" school. There's the "Obama is a conservative mole" school. And then there's the "Obama did the best he could in a bad situation" school. There are other candidates - the slanted press coverage, the radical conservatives in the Congress. Others blame liberalism, either for its lack of political support, lack of enthusiasm in 2010, or lack of recognition of the magnitude of the 2010 defeat.

What camp do I fall into? Who do I think bears the responsibility for this disastrous outcome? Tune in tomorrow and I'll tell you, and make a few suggestions about what should be done next.

The World's Going To Hell And I Feel Fine

2011-07-27T08:10:00.003-04:00

The bizarre disjuncture between the external world and my own life has if anything widened over the last month or so. The last couple of weeks are a particularly good example. Right now I'm on vacation, with an amazing freedom to do pretty much whatever I feel like without feeling guilty about it. I took the opportunity yesterday to work on my novel, reveling in the luxury to spend three hours focused on writing. Back home, I've been helping a candidate for local office and having a ball. It's an uphill race, but our opponents are tremendous goobers.

And then I look at the news and realize that our country's political and cultural life is utterly corrupted, and am very, very glad that I decided not to have children. It's gotten so bad that I've started reading Seneca, who has excellent things to say about preserving one's emotional equilibrium in times of crisis.

The Peril of African Greys

2011-07-03T08:20:00.002-04:00

This is no surprise whatsoever to anyone who has met one of these cunning and ruthless creatures. (h/t: Brad Delong)

Order Has Been Restored!

2011-07-01T16:47:00.002-04:00

Or perhaps was never overthrown.

In response to overwhelming criticism and in fear of invective, mockery, and spittle from bespectacled hordes of literary snobs such as myself, Oxford has restored the serial comma.

Alternatively, perhaps I shouldn't believe every silly thing I read on the internet.

Eliminating Anonymity To Limit Critique?

2011-06-30T16:45:00.004-04:00

I just noticed that Matt Yglesias has altered his blog so that you have to logged into facebook to comment, which is a great way of stunting criticism. Or maybe I'm just confused about the new system. Anyway, I thought it was interesting that Matt had both a blog I really liked, suggesting we could use a bit more selection by lottery, and a post I really detested claiming that after adjusting for comparative living standards he'd rather live in the U.S. than Germany. I think the point of the metric is that MOST PEOPLE would be better off living in Germany. Come on Matt, I thought you read Rawls! Try using the veil of ignorance and imagine you don't know what your job would be in either country. Then tell me whether higher wages balances out poorer health, higher risk of poverty, higher unemployment, more work, and a GREATER RISK OF BEING DEAD.

Daring to write another post about grammar

2011-06-29T15:03:00.002-04:00

I'll take the risk. Evidently the University of Oxford has sold out and abandoned the serial comma. To which I say: boo!

Editing Papers

2011-06-28T11:16:00.001-04:00

Why is it that people with PhD's don't know how to use commas?!?! Yeeeaaaarrrgggghhhh!

WHAT?!?!?!?!

2011-06-22T15:04:00.004-04:00

I was reading Al Gore's essay in the Rolling Stone and this line would have made me sit down if I hadn't already been sitting:

The average American, meanwhile, is watching television an astonishing five hours a day.

Seriously? Can this be right. I mean, what the heck are they watching. I knew I was out of touch, but do you know how many hours of TV I've watched this week? Zero. I'll freely admit that when BH is home we watch a movie or some Buffy episodes, but five hours??? If that's an average, does this mean that there are people out there watching TV 8 hours a day? Don't they have jobs?

BH and I were traveling last week, and while staying in hotels I skimmed through cable to realize, once again, that there's nothing on.

I am so confused.

Back At Home

2011-06-20T09:02:00.002-04:00

BH is off doing a month-long stint in the field in a faraway western state. Last Thursday and Friday I helped her drive out there. She did most of the driving, but I spotted her when she needed to break - she drives much faster than me! We arrived earlier than we'd originally anticipated and looked forward to a nice relaxing day. After sleeping in we had a pleasant brunch, then went to meet up with her research partner. He suggested that we take a short hike to go see a waterfall that turned into an exhausting 4 hour march up the mountain. The waterfall was pretty, but I was reminded of exactly how old I am. Flying home yesterday took about twelve hours, and I arrived home last night around midnight to two ecstatically happy dogs, four seething cats, and a tortoise and bird too sleepy to care I was home.

So this morning I returned to my very warm office a bit jetlagged and missing my wife already. Only 23 days until I see her again!

Re-Thinking Representation

2011-06-15T07:35:00.001-04:00

For some time now I’ve been kicking around the idea of selection of public officials by lottery. The technical term for it is “sortition,” which is pretty unwieldy. Whenever I use the word BH makes a face. Whatever we want to call it, I’m beginning to think that any serious effort to re-think our political paralysis is going to have to involve much greater attention to how we choose the people that represent us, and that the changes required are going to be much more dramatic than we realize.

I’ve always believed that the political system required strong campaign finance reform laws to operate effectively. This is for several reasons. First, the high price of political campaigns, especially in the wake of the Citizens United Decision, slews the public dialogue towards the interests of the rich (and very rich). I have to believe the necessity of winning Wall Street donations is a big reason for the milquetoast Obama presidency. Second, the importance of money makes it extremely unlikely that a broad cross-section of individuals will have a fair chance at serving in government. The current political obsession with deficits in a time of 9% unemployment, or with cutting social security, medicare, and medicaid, is almost inevitably related to the fact that those in the political elite don’t know anybody who’s unemployed or needs medical insurance or don’t have enough to retire on. There’s also the problem of corruption, but I’ll set that aside for now, other than to say that even if there isn’t actually a great deal of graft at any one time (and there’s some evidence that there in fact is corruption of a sort), the appearance of corruption fostered by all the cash flowing around can undermine the legitimacy of the system.

For years I’ve been of the opinion that with a regime of strong campaign finance laws we might be able to improve the quality of political representation. Now I’m not so sure. I’ve been reading lately about the historical development of institutions in republics, and until the 17th century all of them included some element of random selection of public officials. Doing so guarantees that a broader number of perspectives will be heard, and assuming the term of service is brief, makes it clearer that government is not something “out there” acting upon us but something that we control. Now I’m not saying that we need to abolish the House of Representatives, but would it really be so ridiculous to a legislative chamber selected by lot to serve for a year that has to approve legislation?

It sounds radical, I know. And it wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem of corruption after the fact (like Evan Bayh’s sell-out to the chamber or the so-called “Shadow Congress” of ex-members becoming lobbyists). Yet as the country’s population continues to rise, we still have legislative bodies that are almost exclusively composed of people from born in the top ten or twenty percent of the income scale - people who have every reason to support the interests of the rentiers (as Krugman has called them) because they are rentiers themselves, immune to the awful challenges facing the rest of us. Conservatives talk a lot about the democracies being in trouble when the people realize that they can vote themselves goodies at the expense of the rich. Regrettably, what’s more often a problem are political elites who do nothing but enrich themselves and their benefactors - who are most definitely NOT the voters they purport to represent.

While I'm Supposed To Be Working

2011-06-02T15:47:00.002-04:00

I'd like to point out to everybody this wonderfully insightful piece by Bradford Plumer. In it Plumer describes how irrational our attitudes towards commuting and home-buying have become, that we gladly fork over hours of our lives every week in order to have a slightly bigger yard of an extra bedroom. What I find compelling about this piece is that it identifies the one really useful thing I learned in my economics classes: the principle of opportunity costs. Whenever you decide to do A, you forgo B, and need to take the value of B into account. For me, time is precious. I had a good friend who referred to it as his "f*@cking around time." One simply did not interfere with it. For every minute of time I spend commuting (or at work, or mowing the lawn - name your unpleasant task), I'm sacrificing time with my lovely wife or my hobbies or a good book.

What does this have to do with commuting? Well, I hate driving. I was in my mid-twenties before I learned how and to this day I gladly hand over the wheel. One of the reasons I hate driving is that I'm not particularly good at it, but another is that I've never investing sitting in a car with the concept of freedom - I just don't get any inherent pleasure from it. At all. To me every second I spend in the car getting from place to place is a second wasted. At least when I'm walking somewhere I can happily space out. When I'm on a train I can open up a book. Cars? They're mainly good for getting annoyed at your fellow motorists.

So like any good middle-class American I love having a house with a yard and spacious kitchen. I don't think I could ever go back to those tiny holes I lived in New York. On the other hand, I miss the ability to go to the grocery store or to work or the movies without having to sit in a damned car. Or (shudder) look for parking. Bradford is right - there are those of us who would pay good money to have slightly smaller homes that were close to mass transit and/or basic services. Unfortunately the cities we've built either demand "great money" rather than simply good, or don't have a yard for my dog.

Maybe I'm just expecting too much.

Checking In

2011-05-17T13:55:00.003-04:00

So for the last few weeks I've been going through one of those predictable cycles in which I have lots of things I'd like to blog about and so many obligations to fulfill that by the time I have the time to write I don't have the energy.

My paying job has its ups and downs (or is that flats and downs? or downs and further downs?) and is involves a lot of tedium. It's not that my day to day tasks or inherently boring. It's more that I just don't care. I'm not sure if it's the nature of the management (amateurish) or my office (bleak) or the topic (depressing), but* whatever the case I find myself spending much of the day counting the hours until I can go home. Oh well, this is what happens when you go looking for a paycheck rather than a meaningful career. Maybe next time I'll learn. Probably not though.

In terms of my own research, I've finally sent a draft of my very own version of The Paper That Will Not Die to my collaborator. I proceeded to do a dance of heroic joy around my desk, screaming "Freedom!" like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Well, I imagined I was doing that anyway. Then I looked at the other six papers I have lined up to work on next and sighed.

I'm making excellent progress on my novel, which is approximately 4 chapters from a completed first draft. Now if only I hadn't noticed that I had developed a writing tick and then obsessing about it. I use "but"** as a conjunction far too often, or rather I started wondering if I use "but"** too often, and now I careen between using it when I shouldn't and not using it when I should. I always heard that writers were a bizarre species of unhinged introverts with a pathological obsession with grammar. I just never thought I'd be one. To make my writing time even more enjoyable, I have a well-developed case of whatever you call that syndrome where you think everything you write is crap.

Political news these days is depressing, and non-political news is even worse. In the face of the dreariness of public life, after a great deal of encouragement from my lovely spouse I've resumed my personal involvement in electoral politics. To be a bit more honest, BH declared that I was totally miserable about my job and needed to do something I enjoyed, and then offered me as campaign manager to a candidate I'd been advising here and there. And of course I'm glad she did it. It's not a paying gig, but*** it's a start. I'm hoping maybe in a year or two I can land a full time staff job or something. We'll see.

No I haven't given up on my series of posts on education policy. Yes I have one outlined. No I have no idea when it will be finished. Yes I feel bad about it.

My allergies have kicked in again and I'm taking allegra. I was extremely excited to discover that it's available over the counter, but**** I seemed to have made a slight error. Allegra-D was so expensive that I bought a generic sudafed separately from regular allegra. Now that they're so much less expensive I've started taking them as one pill again. Oops. When I take the stuff at night I wake up after a few hours and don't get back to sleep. When I take them in the morning (like today) I feel incredibly groggy (and bloated) all day. So either way I'm exhausted all the time. Wheeee.

And that's my life. Oh, and I just noticed that 9 days will be my 7th anniversary as a blogger. Holy crap.

*You'll realize what this asterisk is for in a minute.
**These don't count
***Is one "but" a paragraph too much?
****I'm really becoming convinced I have a problem.

The Most Likely Effect of Bin Laden's Death On US Foreign Policy & Domestic Politics

2011-05-02T09:54:00.001-04:00

Catching Up

2011-04-29T13:58:00.002-04:00

I've been a wee bit swamped lately and have had to put my series of posts on education policy on the back-burner, but I should be able to return to it soon. In the meantime, here are abbreviated comments on things I considered blogging about.

1. Jill at Feministe loves small plates. All I have to say is - me too! My interest in food materialized at the same time as my interest in small portions. I love nothing better than a nice tasting menu. I think it's a simple matter of diminishing marginal utility: it's a very rare dish that doesn't lose something after the first three bites or so.

2. A disturbingly large percentage of southerners are sympathetic to the confederacy, to the point that they wish it had won the Civil War. Really. One of the most evil political regimes before the 20th century, one that fought a war because they were afraid that someone would take away their slaves. Having grown up in the South I can't say I'm too surprised, although I think part of this poll result is due to the romanticizing of the "Lost Cause," and the fact that our teaching of history has been so distorted that a substantial percentage of Americans think it was about economics rather than slavery. Yes, economics played a role - but the "economics" was about the economics of slavery-based cotton production. It was also about preserving the "southern way of life" - which was based on slavery. And in defense of "states rights" - to allow people to own slaves. Get the picture?

3. A funny faux interview with Alexander Hamilton, using actual quotes of his. I encountered it while reading this piece by William Hoagland. I think Hoagland's interpretation of U.S. financial history after the Revolution is interesting, but I'm not entirely persuaded by his account of Hamilton's motives:

To Hamilton, sound national finance meant concentrating national wealth in a small number of government-connected hands, thus enabling the financing of ambitious national projects. And good U.S. credit meant ensuring that holders of federal bonds — those government-connected high-finance men, the public creditors he hoped would invest in building the nation — could count on staying rich and getting richer by collecting their government interest payments.

I won't belabor the point other than to say that Hamilton never had many illusions about the nation's economic elite, and given the acute lack of specie in the U.S. there was a desperate need for something to use as currency, which a funded federal debt provided. Still, interesting stuff.

4. Booman thinks that liberals need to accept that Democrats have to accommodate moderate Republicans into their coalition, even if it means sacrificing a lot of our goals, in order to hold off the right-wing tide. I would respond that in doing so Obama, Clinton, Carter, etc. have emboldened the right, not held them off. Carter tried to accommodate the Nixon critique of the New Deal, which produced Reagan. Clinton appeased the Reaganites, which produced Gingrich and George Bush. Obama compromised with himself and accepted the Bush legacy, and got Rand Paul. Am I the only one that sees a trend?

5. A nice profile of Paul Krugman in New York magazine. Of course there are the little false equivalences that you always have when discussing politics. There's an odd aside in the piece that Krugman was wrong on bank nationalization - even though failing to do so empowered conservatives in the 2010 elections. Wallace-Wells also suggests that Krugman, by failing to engage intellectually with conservatives, is losing touch with reality. To which I would reply: to engage with contemporary conservatism is the world's fastest way to delusion. Most of them are inhabiting a reality-free Randian universe that exists only in their own adolescent, sociopathic imaginations.

Teacher Tenure

2011-04-13T06:48:00.002-04:00

Tenure is a surprisingly difficult subject to write about. As with much of education policy, it is the subject of intense debate, sweeping generalizations, and surprisingly little direct evidence. The complication lies in the fact that teacher tenure in and of itself does very little. As with much of personnel policy, it is the indirect effects of teacher tenure that have attracted attention, but because it is a conditioning factor (rather than direct factor) it is difficult to identify how tenure might advance or retard educational progress. In that respect teacher tenure is emblematic of what’s gone wrong with the educational debate in this country. We are making dramatic changes with very little idea of what the consequences will be – which is very close to the definition of recklessness.

Let me first try to sum up the neoliberal argument about tenure. As I’ve written previously, there is a stream of literature that highlights the importance of teacher quality in driving educational outcomes. There is also a perceived consensus that the effects of teacher experience tend to decay after only a few years. According to some researchers, there are big improvements in teacher quality in the first few years, but these gains flatten out within the first five years or so. However, because of the salary schedule, rewards to teachers are based on seniority, not effects on students, so that strapped school districts are paying large sums to pay for teachers who are not contributing any more than their more junior colleagues. Furthermore, tenure protections result in the firing of younger, equally high-quality teachers during budget crunches; incorporate due process protections that make it unnecessarily difficult to remove incompetent teachers (see the discussion of “bad teachers” in the last post). In addition, tenure is granted as a matter of routine and so early in a person’s career that all incentives for improvement are removed.

As I hinted at the beginning, there isn’t a substantial research base to back up the claim that tenure policies hurt student achievement. I spent a week searching through the literature and found very few studies that focused specifically on the effects of tenure. Aaronson et al (2007) suggested that tenure policies had no effect on student achievement. Studies by Hansen (2009) in North Carolina and Jacob (2010) in Chicago found that teachers with tenure were more likely to be absent from school. Jacob also found very limited evidence that making dismissals easier improved student achievement.

To be fair, Hanushek (2008) and other could argue that dismissal policies per se aren’t the problem, but rather that there isn’t enough evidence that teacher experience in later years is worth the cost. There a substantial body of work suggesting that teacher experience is important, but that it peaks relatively early (Rivkin et al (2005), Boyd et al (2008a), Croninger et al 2006, Kane et al 2006, Rockoff 2004). This is not an uncontested perspective though. Clotfelter et al (2006, 2007) found evidence for incremental productivity gains in elementary school, and a working paper by Papay & Kraft (unpublished) raises questions about the most commonly used models. Other caveats include the potential positive spillover effects to having experienced teachers at a school (Jackson & Breugmann 2009), and that we might need to focus on teacher experience at a particular grade level rather than generically (Huang & Moon 2009).

For the sake of argument, however, I’ll concede that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that teacher experience isn’t a major contributor for all but rookies. My question would be – what does this have to do with tenure? One of the strongest arguments for tenure is that without it school superintendents would have a tremendous incentive to fire expensive, experienced teachers. The implicit position of neoliberals is that they should, or at least flatten out salaries based on proven performance. I’ll get to the problem of pay-for-performance (or merit pay) another time, but I want to point out that the gist seems to be that we should de-professionalize teaching; that we should treat it as a short-term job rather than as a career. The neoliberal push for things like Teach for America, Troops for Teachers, and alternative certification certainly seems to point in this direction.

Now I ask you, can you name another field other than athletics that benefits from having a junior, disposal, ill-trained workforce? And even if this isn’t the intent, what effects do these proposals have on people considering a career in teaching?

"You, A+ student, how about a 20K a year job with no benefits in which you will be evaluated on the result of standardized tests. Interested? No? Huh, I can’t imagine why.”

This brings us to questions like teacher recruitment and attrition, which are worthy of posts of their own, but in the meantime I want to leave you with one more consideration. Right now neoliberals complain that teacher tenure is not warranted because there is no statistical evidence that it improves student achievement, and is therefore an unnecessary expense. But isn’t it possible that tenure is a substitute for pay and benefits? Without the prospect of tenure, won’t districts have to offer higher pay if they wish to attract teachers? Pay perhaps commensurate with what teachers make in other countries, or workers with similar levels of education here in the states? I haven’t found any research to support this contention, so I will leave it as a hypothesis. I just wish that neoliberals would do the same when it came with attacking tenure – another in a long list of policies where “reformers” are going off half-cocked.

A Promise to Myself

2011-04-12T08:56:00.002-04:00

If this is true I'm not voting for him. If Obama comes out in support of Simpson-Bowles he'll be supporting the following: artificially capping federal spending as a share of GDP, cuting corporate taxation, reducing the progressivity of the tax code, eliminating in-school interest subsidies for student loans, and increases the social security retirement age and cuts social security benefits. This is an austerity budget, one that would make Harry Truman lose his lunch. I was already leaning against supporting Obama because of his consolidation of Bush foreign and interrogation policies, but this would seal it.

And that goes for anyone else who votes to for that matter in Congress or candidates who express support for it. I don't care if they're running against Sarah Palin or Hitler - that spot on the ballot will be blank. Cause you see, there's already one right-wing party and I don't intend to be the advocate of a "slightly less right-wing party."

A quick note

2011-04-06T15:28:00.002-04:00

I've been using much of my spare time preparing a post on teacher tenure, but it's a bit of a tricky area, so it's taken longer than I expected. In the meantime, I feel required to mention that Paul Ryan's budget proposal is evil. If the Democrats were smart they'd be crucifying the Republicans for even breathing the word "Medicare." If they were smart.

"Bad Teachers"

2011-03-31T07:34:00.003-04:00

Please insert standard apology for not blogging in a while here.

To return to my interrupted stream of posts, I assume everyone has heard that Michelle Rhee has gotten herself into a spot of trouble. USA Today is reporting that one of Rhee’s “star” programs is most likely guilty to cheating to improve their standardized test scores. This is precisely the problem I wrote about a few weeks ago: standardized testing as a diagnostic tool is great, but standardized testing as a means of punishing particular districts, schools, or (most especially) individual teachers is a terrible, awful, no-good idea. Gosh, no one could have predicted…wait, I predicted it! I mean, how about this for a conundrum: when you design a high-stakes testing system, who is going to implement the tests? The school districts, and most frequently the teachers. All right, so who gets in trouble if the test scores are below expectations? Why, the teachers. Congratulations and welcome to your gigantic conflict of interest. Under the proposed regime, everyone in the educational system has an incentive to cheat – superintendents, principals, teachers, everybody. There’s a word for this sort of thing on the internets that I think is a good fit: epic fail.

Today’s critique of Matt Yglesias’ latest post on education: in response to criticism of Rhee and the use of high stakes testing, Matt points out that a large proportion of students perform very poorly on standardized tests. I believe this is what his philosophy professors would have called a non sequitur. He assuming the premise that high stakes testing is a means to improving educational performance – which is the very thing that critics of neoliberal education reform are contesting.

Oh, and do remember the nice things I said about the KIPP charter schools a few weeks ago? I might have to take it back - it turns out that they get more money and have higher turnover among students than regular public schools. Hence, their superior performance is called into question. (h/t Oliver Willis)

And now at last I shall return to the topic I promised to discuss two weeks ago: the focus on bad teachers. One of the latest fads of neoliberals is to focus on the problem of eliminating bad teachers from the classroom. The logic goes something like this:

1) research suggests that teacher quality is a key ingredient in student performance

2) given that some teachers are much worse than others, if we can get rid of weaker teachers then student performance will improve

2) collective bargaining agreements guarantee due process, making it difficult to eliminate teachers

3) therefore, by eliminating collective bargaining and making it easier to fire teachers, you can increase student performance.

Now there is definitely something to point #1. Teachers certainly have an effect on student performance. Eric Hanushek, one of the leaders in this field, has a good review here. Now where Hanushek gets really aggressive is with the idea that if you replace “bad” teachers with “good” ones you will necessarily improve student achievement. Well, maybe, assuming you have a good mechanism for identifying good teachers in a fair way. Which as I suggested before, we don’t. I’d like to take this opportunity to throw in one more piece of evidence that the teacher accountability systems that use the VAM are questionable: Rothstein’s recent article in which he uses future teacher effects to predict how students did in the past. Sounds crazy right? Well it is – that’s what Rothstein is tested, whether the VAM results were taking into account student sorting by teacher. I’ll let you guess what he found.

What we also don’t have is any research that tests what happens when we put this policy into practice. I for one am profoundly worried at the potential spillover effects on the rest of the teaching force at the focus on firing teachers rather than improving them, with respect to morale, retention, and recruitment. Furthermore, I have yet to see any evidence that the spillover effect from bad teachers is worse than the spillover effect from less effective employees in other professions. It’s also a real question whether the effects of a bad teacher in one grade are permanent, or whether future mediocre or good teachers would dilute/nullify their effects. As you can see there’s a ton we don’t know and haven’t studied carefully. Now we do have one field test of what happens when teachers don’t have due process protections: they’re called charter schools, and the result has been higher teacher turnover and efforts at unionization.

So what we have is a neoliberal proposal, championed by political conservatives, that might have a theoretical effect on the academic performance of some students, but for which there is no clear basis in the research literature and has never been adequately tested. Again.

Next time: teacher tenure.

Passing Of An Era

2011-03-23T14:10:00.003-04:00

I was going to write more about education policy today, but news of the death of Elizabeth Taylor stopped me. I remember the first time I saw her in a movie: it was Cleopatra I think, a silly movie for which I have a soft spot, and one that played a big role in my love old movies. I don't know if I've ever seen another actress with the same strange mix of pluck, humor, bitchiness and breathtaking beauty. I only saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf recently, but no one who saw her performance could ever question her acting talents. Rest in peace.

Evaluating Teachers

2011-03-15T09:49:00.006-04:00

One of the central planks in the neoliberal agenda is what they call "accountability" - using standardized tests as an instrument for school improvement. There are a lot of pieces of the accountability movement, but today I'd like to focus on one that has gotten a lot of attention recently: using standardized test scores to making hiring, firing, and promotion decisions for individual teachers.

The other day Academic Cog linked to a NYT article showing a very scary looking equation used to evaluate teacher performance. The piece described pretty well how standardized tests scores are being used to decide who does and doesn't get tenure. Without getting too deeply into the methodological weeds, the basic approach is to try to isolate the effects that teachers have on student performance, controlling for other factors. The "value-added model" (or VAM) uses changes in student performance over time to rank teachers. These statistical estimates have been used to create unnervingly specific ratings for teachers, ratings that have been published in major newspapers. It's not often that social science statistics inspire such heated controversy (with major spreads in NYT (above), USA Today, and the Columbia Journalism Review), but that's what happen when statistics determine the fate of millions of teachers.

So what's wrong with the idea of using objective measures of student achievement to assess teacher performance? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. Two pretty good reviews of problems with the VAM were published last year, one by Sean Corcoran for Annenberg and the other by Baker et al for the Economic Policy Institute. To summarize:

1. Imprecision: the statistical models have too much built-in error to make reliable determinations of individual teacher performance. A report by NCES suggests that there is at least a 25% chance of misdiagnosis (they suggest school-level analysis instead).

2. Instability: teacher and student performance tends to bounce around from year to year. An teacher who is considered very good in one year might be labeled as terrible in another.

3. Poorly constructed assessments: state standardized tests have all sorts of problems, such as being predictable (and thus easy to game). There's also some reason to think that the choice of assessment has a big effect on how a teacher performs. A major problem is that some tests have ceilings that are too low. If you're teaching a class in which 75% of your students score in the 90th percentile, are you a bad teacher because they haven't gotten better by the end of the year?

4. Model specification problems: it is very difficult to make sure that you have appropriately controlled for all the various confounding variables. As complex as Academic Cog's equation looked, the biggest concern might be too few variables.

5. Narrow subjects: there's an unfounded assumption that standardized tests accurately measure the whole of student knowledge in a given subject. In fact what they do is test how well students are able to answer questions that are amenable to standardized testing. Lots of things are hard to ask about in a standardized format. To make matters worse, even if we choose to believe that the assessments that have been created are good enough to be used to evaluate students accurately, what do we do for teachers who aren't teaching math or reading in grades 3-8? Are we just going to eliminate the other subjects? Or are only elementary and middle school teachers going to be on the hook?

6. Perverse incentives: a whole laundry list, not least of which is that teachers and principals are going to have every reason in the world to do nothing but testing drills all year, not to mention outright cheating.

Good statistical models for assessing student and teacher performance are very desirable, but what worries me most is that they are being used for purposes for which they were never intended. They're designed to determine general, aggregate influences, not label a specific teacher "good" or "bad." Policymakers and neoliberal activists are mis-using these tools. The research on using data to improve student performance states clearly that standardized tests should just be one of a range of assessment tools - not the final word. Value-added models aren't being used to identify what effective teaching practices, rather they are being used to identify scapegoats, to lay blame on individual "bad" teacher and to fire them. More on the whole "bad teacher" obsession of neoliberals next time.

Charter Schools

2011-03-08T13:16:00.004-05:00

In honor of Leslie-MB, I'm going to start off with charter schools. Let me begin by saying that in principle I have nothing against charter schools. The idea of creating experimental laboratories of education reform that are under the loose supervision of public authorities is a good one. I especially like the original vision of charter schools, which would be organized by teachers eager to try out new means of teaching students. Seriously, let a thousand flowers bloom: modified curricula, team teaching, alternative assessments, differing class schedules, ability grouping, etc. etc. In the beginning charter schools looked like a wonderful opportunity to field-test ideas about improving eduction. If the charter school movement had stuck to this original conception, I would be moderately supportive.

Sadly, in practice charter schools have not worked out that way. Now we can't know for sure how innovative charter schools are because there isn't a lot of research on the subject. Which should tell us something! I mean, if the whole idea behind charters is creating new educational methods, why isn't there an avalanche of rigorous data? To the extent that we do know what's happening in charters, it appears that on the whole charters teach students in ways quite similar to traditional public schools. The chief "innovation" of most charter schools is to avoid having teachers unions. The most successful charters, like KIPP, have adopted a model that pushes its teachers extremely hard - we're talking 60+ hours a week hard. The results are predictable: high teacher turnover, periodic bouts of union activity, and a model that can't be scaled up. (To be fair, some evidence suggests that the higher turnover is due to the kind of teacher that is hired by charters rather than personnel policy, but this hardly makes things better)

There is a huge volume of literature analyzing the effects of charter schools, some of a fair amount of rigor and some not. Meta-analysis by CREDO studying the overall effects of charters suggests that charter school performance is very similar to traditional school performance. Some are good, some are bad, and most provide an education that is pretty much the same as that of traditional schools. This is consistent with my impression of the research literature: that on balance charter schools as a whole are no better than other schools, once background characteristics and the like are controlled for (that last is a really vital point).

Now on one level these ambiguous results shouldn't be a surprise. If charter schools are adopting innovative teaching methods, we should expect results that are roughly comparable to other schools. However, even if charter schools ARE being innovative, we STILL wouldn't expect their performance to be radically better than traditional schools for the simple reason that not all innovations succeed. After all, if improving education were easy the regular K-12 system would have done so ages ago. Finally, there's the possibility that a focus on innovation can actually reduce student achievement.

With such limited evidence that charter schools are superior to traditional schools, one wonders why there is such a powerful constituency in favor of them. I think it stems from several sources. There are people who believe that the regular K-12 system is ineffective through some mix of bureaucratic corruption, teacher incompetence, union malfeasance, overregulation, or what have you. There are also people who, influenced by neoliberal market models, have simply deduced that a choice-based system will inevitably lead to higher performance. There are wealthy foundations who are looking for a "big win" by identifying THE educational model. There are politicians who are looking for an easy political fix to education, something that makes it look like they are "doing something."

The problem with many charter school advocates is that they have confused a mechanism for identifying educational innovations with a direct instrument for improving education. Charter schools are a means, but its most passionate champions are treating it as an end.

To boil it down even more, let me say that if the charter school advocates were right, if introducing market mechanism in education and maximizing "administrator flexibility" were the secret to educational improvements, if charter schools were the panacea that its supporters often suggest, we would already know it. There are thousands of charters serving millions of students, and so far we just haven't seen the dramatic improvements in student performance that we've been promised.

None of this is to say that there aren't very good charter schools out there. There most certainly are. There are also very poor ones. As far as I'm concerned, any pundit or policymaker (or moviemaker) who breezily argues that charters are the cure for our nations' educational ills either don't know what they're talking about or pimping an agenda. Either way they should be treated with scorn.

A Lovely Example of Neoliberal Idiocy

2011-03-05T09:43:00.002-05:00

As an aside, I would like to identify Matt Yglesias as one of the worst offenders of sloppy thinking on education by liberal-leaning pundits. I generally like Matt's blog, but he has a terrible habit of holding forth on subjects before he's done his homework. There must be something in the water in D.C. that makes liberal pundits become elitist hacks. The most recent example is his post on the inability of public schools to narrow the achievement gap. A recent paper suggested that the gap between white and black students manifests itself before they ever attend school and persists, largely unchanged, through there involvement in the K-12 system. Matt then proceeds to use this as an argument for cutting K-12 funding and putting it into early childhood education.

I had to stop myself from screaming when I read this post. Matt has completely missed the distinction between educational equity and educational quality. Are schools good at closing achievement gaps? No. Are they good at teaching students things? As a matter of fact they are, as evidenced by the greater knowledge possessed by 18 year old high school graduates as compared with 6 year olds. Even the worst school system teaches kids something. Matt is right that we could cut school funding without altering the gap between white and black students, but the performance of both groups would be lower. Matt's proposals might make white and black school achievement more equal, but they would also make both groups dumber.

I'm all for a greater investment in pre-k, but let's not be idiots about it.

The Pathologies of Education Reform, or Throwing Caution To The Winds

2011-03-04T15:17:00.004-05:00

I've been vacillating on whether or not to write this post for years now, for reasons that aren't very difficult to guess. But whether I am becoming more rash in old age, or simply disgusted with the trajectory of public debate on this issue, I am going to set aside my caution and engage the topic directly. It may not matter either way, given the likely small number of readers of this blog. But whatever the consequences, I can't in good conscience remain silent.

For the last decade or more we have been undergoing a powerful wave of education reform, one that has enjoyed massive (and bipartisan) support among policymakers, thinktanks, foundations, and the press. It is characterized by high-stakes testing, accountability, and various forms of school choice. I've taken to calling this movement neo-liberal education, because it is a part of the broader move towards market-based reforms in the public sector and the deregulation of the market in the private sector.

Although I strongly agree that the educational sector needs reform, and that there are some elements of the proposed changes that are worthwhile, as a whole I think that neoliberal reform in education, as with like-minded reforms, is at best (to steal the expression of a friend of mine) a GWOT - a Giant Waste Of Time. Whether it is merit pay for teachers, the weakening of collective bargaining in the name of administrator flexibility, charter schools, "turn-around" school reform, or high-stakes testing, I think that as they are being implemented these reforms will NOT achieve their stated objectives. They will not close achievement gaps. They will not make the U.S. an international leader in math and science. They will not improve the overall quality of education for American children. The best case scenario is that in ten years we will realize that neoliberal reform was just another fad that failed to live up to its overzealous champions' ambitions, and we will move on to some other set of reforms.

That's the best case scenario. What about the worst?

Although neoliberal education reform will fail to achieve its overt goals, I think there is a good chance that it will accomplish the implicit goal of many of its principal proponents, which is to undermine the system of public education. Yes, we might still have something called a "public school system," but like so many other public services that have been contracted out, education will effectively be controlled by the private sector, for the benefit of administrators and shareholders, and to the advantage of our country's most privileged citizens.

In the coming weeks, I am going to lay out why I am taking such a strong stance on these issues. I will (as time permits) examine each of the components of neoliberal education reform and explain why I it is I think they are going to fail. Unlike so many pundits, I will try not rely on sloppy logic, gross generalizations, and misleading anecdotes. Instead, I will rely on the evidence, on the research in the field, which provides precious little support for the idea that neoliberal education reforms will accomplish anything that we might wish.

Principal Agent Problems and Progressive Taxation

2011-03-02T15:29:00.003-05:00

I think I have one potential solution to the problem of prospective corruption I mentioned yesterday. Okay, this is a little wonkish, but bear with me.

Traditionally liberals have argued that richer Americans should pay a greater proportion of their income in taxes on a number of different grounds, including:

1) Taxes are necessary for a civilized society and they have a greater ability to pay
2) The wealthy benefit disproportionately from the existing socioeconomic order
3) Poorer and middle class citizens have a greater marginality propensity to consume, and therefore lower taxes on those groups will lead to greater economic growth. Conversely, concentration of wealth at the top leads to asset bubbles.
4) Economic arrangements should be to the benefit of the least advantaged member of society.
5) Capitalism has a natural tendency to concentrate wealth and progressive taxes are need to fairly distribute the social surplus.
6) Excessive concentrations of wealth can undermine democracy in the short term (because of the rich's greater ability to influence the political process) and the long term (because of the creation of hereditary oligarchies and the related negative effects of a declining middle class)

It's not an exhaustive list, and the categories aren't sharply defined, but you get the idea. So what I've been thinking is that there is a seventh argument, namely that steeply graduated tax rates can help address principal-agent problems. Principal-agent problems are one in which there is a difference in the incentives between those who "hire" others to perform a task (the principals, and those who are the ones who actually perform the task (the agents). Economists are quite familiar with principal-agent problems in the private sector, where CEO's have an incentive to pump up stock in the short term without any concern for the long-term good of the shareholder's company. In politics the principal-agent problem manifests itself as the difference between the policy preferences (ideal or express) of the voters and the career interests of elected officials.

Got it? Great. So here's my (very tentative) idea: if we heavily tax incomes above a certain amount, then there won't be a big pot of gold waiting for congresspersons once the leave office. Right now they have a reasonable prospect of becoming millionaires or deca-millionaires. But if there were a 70%+ marginal tax rate on the top incomes - which we had until 1980 - AND there weren't a million loopholes, then suddenly selling one's soul doesn't look so profitable.

Now I'm not talking about a 70% tax rate on people making $100K, or even $370 K, which are no at the 28% and 35% rate respectively. (Did you know that making 350K puts you in the top 1% of households? I didn't.) No, I'm talking about the top .01% or so of income earners, 140 thousand people who right now make 2 million a year and earn 10% of all the adjusted gross income in the United States (see the tax foundation if you don't believe me).

It would only be a start, unfortunately, since the average net worth of members of Congress is over six million. We should do something about that too.

Rethinking Political Corruption

2011-03-01T13:48:00.002-05:00

Something that's been bothering me lately is the career trajectories of former legislators. Now I'm not talking about political staffers who serve for a few years and then go work for the companies that lobbied them. That's a substantial problem, but at the end of the day elected officials are responsible for their own actions. No, what I'm more interested in is the phenomena where members of Congress retire or leave office and then begin working as lobbyists or on corporate boards. Our political system is predicated on the notion that officeholders wish more than anything else to remain officeholders. The representative system simply presumes that by threatening to withhold their vote citizens can hold elected officials accountable.

My question is whether this presumption reflects reality. I haven't done the empirical research, but it appears that a lot of elected officials are receiving large financial rewards for their behavior while in the legislature. There's a two-year ban on lobbying after you leave office, but there's nothing to stop a corporation (it's always a corporation) from paying an ex-congressman at $1000000 a year salary for life as a reward for "good behavior" while serving in office. Here's an example: let's say a member of Congress gets an amendment through worth a billion dollars a year over ten years to a given company, for a total of 10 billion in gains for the company. The member of congress is defeated or retires and is paid that $1 million a year salary for the next thirty years, for a total of $30 million. A simple cost-benefit ratio suggests that the company in question will have enjoyed a 333 to 1 return on their investment. Not too shabby.

There's a lot wrong with this back-of-the-envelope calculation. A single member of congress isn't usually well placed enough, for example. But my worry is whether there are enough members of congress who in the back of their minds say to themselves "I'll vote the way the financial industry wants me to, even if I'm not sure it's the right thing to do, because they'll help me out in the election. And even if I lose, they'll take care of me later."

My question is this: what in the world could be done to stop something like this from happening? Under the new campaign finance regime, what's to stop corporations from sponsoring candidates for office with the understanding that the candidate will "play ball" while in office and be richly rewarded should they lose? What laws are there on the books to prosecute an elected official, when we're not really talking about an explicit quid pro quo?

The answer is.....nothing. Nothing at all.

Because I don't like to curse

2011-02-22T15:33:00.001-05:00

What Rude Pundit said.

Understanding the Real Problem

2011-02-22T09:21:00.003-05:00

I get the sense that liberals are starting to realize that there are serious institutional obstacles to any sort of progressive revival. The amazingly rapid recovery of the conservative movement after its crushing defeats in 2006-2008 have been deeply discouraging - we all thought that the worm had finally turned (so to speak) but now things look if anything darker than they did in 2005. Even with a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate, Paul Krugman has stated that the the U.S. is for all intents a purposes an oligarchy. All public policies are for the benefit of the wealthiest among us, or at least that no policy can be enacted without their consent, what Glenn Greenwald has described as corporatism.

Kevin Drum argues persuasively that the decline of unions has not only had a direct negative effect on the American economy by removing a counterweight to business, but that this decline has made the Democratic Party a less effective instrument for middle and working class economic concerns. Elected officials have to get re-elected, and and without unions leading Democrats have had to turn more and more to big business.

Eric Alterman is making a related point in his book Kabuki Democracy. I haven't read it yet, but if the article it's based on and the reviews of the work are any indication, the basic point is a sound one: American politics is structurally biased against liberal reform.

In one sense the Obama administration has been deeply disappointing. I've argued for some time that what concerned me about his presidency wasn't details of the legislation he had or hadn't passed, but his sense of priorities. My belief is that there are structural problems afflicting American politics that require structural solutions. Obama's presidency, whether in respect to the stimulus bill or health care or what have you, has been essentially policy-oriented, accepting the structure as it is. This inattention to the more deep-seated set of problems means that all his victories are provisional, and that the underlying trajectory of the United States remains unchanged. And now the opportunity has been lost.

It's all very discouraging, to be sure, but I'm pleased that Obama's failure to revive liberalism has sparked some soul-searching among liberals. Thinkers like Drum, Hacker, Krugman, and Drum have come around to the idea that we're going to have to do more than simply elected a Democratic President and Congress to solve our problems. What we have to do is set out a new agenda for the Democratic Party as a whole - one that addresses the fundamental problem of economic and political inequality.

Why Care About Unions?

2011-02-21T10:48:00.002-05:00

One thing that I think gets missed in discussions about unions is the role they play in an economy full of large corporations. In a small business the owner of the business usually has a strong day-to-day involvement in the running of it. He or she (usually a he, alas) interacts with employees every day. They're people, not dehumanized labor-producing objects. As a consequence I'm guessing that mistreatment of a certain sort is a lot less common than it is in big businesses, where the people who set policy never interact with their employees. It's much easier to dehumanize someone that is just another number on a spreadsheet. In a big business, labor costs are just that - costs to your bottom line that need to minimized in any way possible. In a small business it's more likely that you see those workers as actual human beings, with their own needs and value. None of this is to say that there isn't mistreatment in small business, and I think that sexism in particular could be even worse. But the sort of systemic treatment of one's workers as an extension one's will, as just things to be moved around, to treat people you know on a personal level like that takes a very special kind of sociopath.

And hence unions. Maybe they're not as necessary in small firms, but in large businesses, they're the only way that the management gets reminded that their employees are people too. Get rid of them and all those stories out of Dickens seems a lot more probable.

On Wisconsin

2011-02-18T13:21:00.004-05:00

It's no secret that Republicans have long disliked labor unions. The recent attacks on public employees is only the latest episode in a decades-long campaign to delegitimize, marginalize, and ultimately destroy every union in the country, public or private. From a political point of view I can't fault their motivation or their sense of timing. With so few workers in the private sector covered by unions, and with state budgets in such dire straits, it's an opportune time for Republicans to finally rid themselves of a key Democratic voting bloc. Despite the protests, I suspect that they will ultimately succeed. Frankly I'll be surprised if the unionization rate in the U.S. doesn't drop into the low single digits over the next decade or so.

Why so glum? My nature perhaps, and the fact that these are discouraging times. But more importantly I don't have a great deal of confidence that the Democratic Party will do anything to stop it. As with abortion rights or gun control, Democrats have stopped fighting very hard for unions. They're pretty much absent from the public debate on these issues, which means that one one side you have a barrage of relentless propaganda and on the other....nothing. It's difficult to sustain popular support for a position under such circumstances. Just look at how many elected Democrats are playing footsie with neoliberal reforms in education like merit pay and charter schools - reforms that are largely lacking in evidentiary support and strike directly at the heart not just of teachers unions, but of the very idea of public education.

Now it's not that it wouldn't be easy to make a case that we should stand up for the rights of workers to organize. The national leadership of the party (I'm talking to you Obama) should land in Wisconsin, join the protest, and give a speech arguing that every worker in this country should have the right to look their employer in the eye, that it's an impossibility to win these battles individually but that they can only be won together. It's the same problem we're facing in so many spheres of American life - the idea that things will get better if we all just go it alone, or wait for the magic of the market to solve our problems for us. Life doesn't work that way. That's how you fight a political war against conservatism - make it about bigger stakes, challenge people to rise above their own narrow self-interest, identify the enemy.

But that's not going to happen. We'll have a press release or two, and some noises about how unfair it all is, and then the Democrats in Washington will go to another fundraiser and collect donations from Goldman Sachs and Northrup-Grumman and talk about how important it is to have a "good business environment." I mean really, look at what lack of regulations, no unions, and low wages has done for Mississippi!

Dealing with Bullies

2011-02-08T07:07:00.005-05:00

When I was a kid I got in fights a lot. Most were a response to someone trying to dominate me in some way, and when that happened I always resisted, resistance that often led to violence. Sometimes I was the one who "started" the fight. It depended on what type of bully I was dealing with. The ones that wanted to fight and were looking for an excuse to hurt someone - you couldn't avoid a fight with them. The fight was the whole point. They were stupid and I could usually get together some friends and ambush them on the playground. After that they'd leave you alone. The ones I really hated - the ones that I got accused of picking fights with - were the ones that wanted a symbol of subordination. They would have left me alone if I'd let them walk over me, but I never did. It was harder to get people to help you against the latter sort of bully. My classmates couldn't understand why I couldn't give way.

Either way I would end up in the principal's office. To tell the truth I lost almost every fight - I was short, fat, and not all that coordinated. But I never stopped, either during the fight or after. And by the time I was ten or eleven bigger and stronger kids had started getting the message that if they screwed with me they were going to end up underneath a bookcase (true story). After a while people decided that I just wasn't worth the trouble.

None of this is to endorse the use of violence. As an adult it would never occur to me to behave in such a way. If I were a child today it would be stupid to do so. Times were different in the eighties. Kids weren't bringing guns and knives to school. Acting like that now would get me expelled or seriously injured. I would have preferred it if teachers and principals would have stepped in and stopped the casual acts of cruelty that the strong used against the weak. But they didn't. And it was a useful lesson for me - that in life there are going to be times when there is no one in authority to guarantee justice, and when that happens you have to stick up for yourself, no matter what the cost .When you are in position of weakness, the only way to present a credible threat to deter another is to be willing to go to ludicrous lengths to retaliate.

And this is what brings me back to politics, and my frustration with a common type of liberal. Maybe it's because most left-of-center intellectuals grew up in comfortable, middle class circumstances, or maybe my childhood experiences just scarred me for life, but for whatever reason, most of my political fellow travelers, politicians or not, have absolutely no appetite for conflict. They shy away from it instinctively. These are well-meaning people that I agree with 90% of the time but who make me want to scream with frustration when they claim that surely there are conservatives with whom we can deal in good faith. Of course there are, I respond, but those aren't people with any power. The ones who do control the conservative movement, and most of the rank and file of that movement, would happily repeal the 20th, 19th, and 18th century if they thought they could get away with it. Their political agenda is quite simply one of domination: domination of women, or the poor, of anyone that isn't in their special little club. Appeasing them isn't going to be any more constructive than it would have been for me in 3rd grade. All it will do is let them win, and persuade them that they are right to hold us in contempt. The entire motivation behind right-wing psychology is that they want to dominate other people. Negotiating with people like that is a waste of time.

Maybe Barack Obama never had a problem with being bullied. It's the only thing that can explain his treatment of the Chamber of Commerce. After the chamber underwrites smears against him and his party and pushes policies that are both deeply self-interested and profoundly antithetical to the country's well-being, what does Obama do? He makes nice with them. If it had been me, I would have made a speech at the chamber all right. But they would have never invited me to another.

Centripetal Forces of New Media

2011-02-07T13:52:00.004-05:00

You may or may not have heard that Huffington Post is being purchased by AOL. This is certainly good news for Arianna Huffington, both with respect to her political influence and her bank account (isn't she loaded already?). There is also some possibility that it will create additional left-leaning ballast in the national media - although it seemed to me that HuffPost was doing pretty well all on its own. My biggest problem with the acquisition is that it represents yet another step in the concentration of media into fewer and fewer hands. The internet started out as a fairly open system, amenable to a range of new voices, yet over time virtually every significant voice has been absorbed into a larger institutional framework. A few of these are still independent - like Daily Kos and Firedoglake - but most seem to have been scooped up by more established media players. Perhaps this is inevitable, but I must admit a pang at seeing the gradual death of the freewheeling blogosphere of 2004. My goodness, has it already been seven years?

(edit: that's what I get for not looking up how to spell "centripetal" first)

Federal Judge Strikes Down Whole Health Care Law

2011-02-01T08:58:00.002-05:00

Well, no one can say that we didn't see this one coming. Although most informed observers believe the Supreme Court is highly unlikely to declare the entire health care law unconstitutional, it's certainly possible that it will. The fate of any progressive law now depends on the whims of Anthony Kennedy. God help us. And what happens if the Republicans get one more wingnut in the Scalia mold onto the court, so that they have a 5-vote majority. I suspect that they expeditiously eliminate the entire 20th century liberal achievement. And then what will we do?

Disgusting

2011-01-28T15:07:00.002-05:00

Republicans want to deny health insurance coverage for abortion procedures in cases of statutory rape. And rape when the woman is drugged, drunk, or mentally impaired. Or incest above the age of 18.

I really don't know what to say. Wait, yes I do. This is evil.

Holy Crap!

2011-01-28T13:30:00.003-05:00

I skip the news for a couple of days and popular protests break out all over the Arab world. Wild. My knowledge about this subject is extremely sketchy, so just chasing links around trying to figure out what's going on. If Hosni Mubarak's government falls it could be the most significant change of regime since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Premature Senility

2011-01-18T20:53:00.002-05:00

Funny, I don't remember a Republican winning the 2008 presidential election. I must be confused.

MLK Day

2011-01-17T16:06:00.003-05:00

It's difficult to speak about MLK other than in cliches. He was probably the most important leader the United States has ever produced, an inspiration to every person with even the tiniest morsel of decency. The world would be a far better place if there were more like him.

Matt Yglesias "Does" Philosophy

2011-01-11T21:27:00.002-05:00

Not for the first time, Matt Yglesias has held forth on Rawlsian theory as if he knows something about it. As I suspected, his total exposure to Rawls is one Harvard undergraduate course. Now I don't think discussions about political philosophy should be restricted to those who have PhD's in political philosophy. I certainly don't have one. But I have spent over a decade trying to understand Rawls. He is deceptively simple on the surface but his theories are actually quite subtle. He's not someone you can just skim and expect to absorb.

What bothers me about Yglesias is that (as he does with education policy), Matt is taking a little superficial knowledge and running with it. I suppose that's an operational risk for bloggers, but he's particularly egregious about it, especially since he quite clearly has no idea what he's talking about. I mean seriously, perhaps if the entire Anglo-American discipline of political theory has been dominated by a single thinker for forty years this person's arguments can't be disposed of so glibly?

Hmm. Now that I think of it, there's probably a lesson in that for me too.

The Assassination Attempt in Arizona

2011-01-11T07:27:00.002-05:00

I'm sure all of you have heard about the terrible incident in Arizona, where U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords was shot and a number of bystanders killed, including a nine year old girl and a federal judge. I waited a few days to clear my head on the matter and to watch the depressingly predictable course of public discussion about the shooting. I'm not going to parse the question of blame anymore than to say that I believe that inflammatory rhetoric by right-wing politicians, lax gun control laws, and an inadequate mental health system probably all contributed to the event. There's been a great deal of discussion on this question to which I have little new to add.

Instead I'd like to describe how I found out about the murders. I was sitting on my couch watching television and trying to ignore my bird's temper tantrum when my cellphone rang. A friend I hadn't spoken to in a few months was calling to tell me what had happened. The connection wasn't a good one and at first I thought he was saying that Kathy Lee Giffords had been murdered, which I thought rather strange. He repeated the name. It took a moment for me to remember who Gabby Giffords was, but once I understood why my friend had called me. He's an elected official in a previous place I used to live, one I'd helped get elected and with whom I'd become very close. He'd spoken many times with me about his concerns that the growing radicalism of the right wing was going to lead to political violence. I'd always hoped he was wrong but feared he wasn't. Anyone who attends public functions understands that there are a lot of disturbed people out there, people who don't realize violent political metaphors aren't meant to be taken literally. My friend was deeply shaken. Aside from any personal fears he might have about his own safety, he has two young children. I tried to comfort him, but there was little I could say. We both knew that nothing would be done to reduce the ferocity of the debate. The only question is whether there is a second attack against a Democratic officeholder, and if there is whether it will finally force the right to pull back or whether it will simply spark copycats.

There's the intellectual concerns I have, that the principal thing distinguishing the contemporary right from fascist movements is the use of political violence. Should assassinations of elected leaders become commonplace our republic will be placed in the most profound jeapordy. At the end of day such considerations are mere abstractions, however. My stakes in the issue are more personal.

I have a lot of friends in politics, some of whom are elected officials and others who work for them. Any of them could be the next victim. What's more, I could be one of them. I go to a lot of Democratic political events. I used to work for an officeholder, and I will probably do so again. Some day I could be another Gabe Zimmerman. I even used to have his job title.

Hopeful Signs

2011-01-07T14:26:00.003-05:00

It's not much in the grand scheme of things, but stories like this give me hope:

Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.
From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.
..............
In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent – the symbol of an “Egypt for All”. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

Every time I read this article I get a little weepy.

Hat tip to Cogitamus.

They All Deserve Help

2011-01-06T09:42:00.002-05:00

You may have heard about the homeless man with the "Golden Voice." His story went viral and he was flooded with offers of help. It's a nice, heartwarming story, but something about it bugged me and this morning while driving to work through the snow (again) I realized what it was. This man is getting help because of his talent and (to a lesser extent) because of his gracious demeanor. My question is...what if he hadn't had that voice? Let's say that rather than working on air at the radio station he'd been a file clerk, or a janitor, or a tech guy. Otherwise let's imagine the same exact situation: man starts dabbling in drugs, gets sucked into them, and loses his way. A nice man, eager for a fresh start. Now I ask you - would he have received the outpouring of help he has if he hadn't had such a media-friendly gift? I contend that the answer is no.

Which tells you everything you need to about how twisted our society has become. We only offer compassion and a helping hand to someone who can entertain us, who has a particular kind of gift (like putting a ball in a hoop or singing) or who have been born with money. The other 99.999% of people are told to "get a job" and "pull themselves up by their bootstraps."

I'm not saying that Ted Williams didn't deserve help. He most certainly did. But it's not because he has a great baritone. It's because he's a human being.

Breathing In Between Sections

2010-12-22T10:06:00.003-05:00

I'm taking a quick breather after spending an hour working on a paper that's due today. Stressful but oddly exhilarating. Yes, I know, I need help. I just updated my Goodreads and realized how many books I'm reading right now. When am I going to stop reading multiple books at the same time? Sometimes I just can't help myself.

In other news, my brother and his wife are coming up for Christmas tomorrow, which I'm pretty excited about. We probably won't do much other than watch TV and play board games, but after a very long and frustrating year that sounds a lot like paradise.

If I don't post again for a bit, let me just say now: Happy Holidays!

Treason in Defense of Slavery Day

2010-12-21T06:53:00.002-05:00

Evidently yesterday was the 150th anniversary of a bunch of rich white guys seceding so they would be able to exploit poor black people. I've made my feelings about confederate apologism pretty clear in the past, so I won't belabor the point other than to note that one of the few areas where I still might support the death penalty is treason. I did see this picture though, which cracked me up:

Why Learn French?

2010-12-20T15:43:00.002-05:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, John McWhorter at the New Republican wonders why we should care if people learn French; more particularly, why we should care if French is eliminated from college curricula. Well I can tell you why I learned French (or at least tried too) - I thought it was pretty. That was it, just aesthetic reasons. You can talk about the mold growing in your refrigerator and the noxious smell it's emitting and I can guarantee that the French have a wistfully poetic-sounding expression for it. That and so much of the history I'm interested in takes place in or near France.

But that's only me. McWhorter makes a good point - why aren't we learning Arabic or Chinese? McWhorter leaves Spanish alone, because it's pretty obvious why that language is important, but why is Latin or French or German or Italian sacrosanct? I think it's probably a mistake to lump Latin in with modern languages, since Latin is our gateway to the whole classical world, but I'll leave that aside. For me it's really quite simple: I don't care what foreign language someone learns, I just want them to learn one. I worry about switching our focus to Chinese and Arabic for fairly cynical reasons - Americans don't like learning foreign languages and I suspect they'd be even more resistant to learning Chinese (which is an extraordinary difficult language to learn) than to learn something as akin to English as German or French.

But ultimately this whole discussion is a distraction. We aren't be asked to choose between French and Chinese. We're being expected to be quiescent while we squeeze the humanities out of the curriculum. It's not that Americans won't be learning French in school that bothers me. It's that they won't be learning anything.

On Writing

2010-12-20T13:25:00.004-05:00

I've been reading George Orwell essays lately (they can be found here) and I found these two bits from "Inside the Whale" particularly insightful:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

and

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

Sigh. Double sigh.

2010-12-07T17:23:00.002-05:00

And the award for biggest political nincompoop of the year goes to: Barack Obama. I mean, would a Republican president EVER go out of his way to bash his base? Ever? Yegads the idiocy, it burns.

And now we get the fun of a payroll tax holiday that will be extended, thus gutting social security, all so we can pay for tax breaks for millionaires. Again.

Rejected

2010-12-02T15:44:00.002-05:00

Remember that journal submission I finally sent out? Flat out rejected. The reviews were pretty critical, but the only one that really stung was the comment about "exceptionally poor writing." Ouch.

I will now go sit in a corner and sulk.

Life's Natural Evolution

2010-12-01T14:50:00.002-05:00

I am exceptionally busy these days. I'm writing a novel (with ideas for several more), engaged in several academic projects (both in political science and philosophy), continuing my involvement in politics, and developing my expertise in and understanding of my current professional field. I'm happy to be as intellectually and creatively productive as I am, but I have to say I find myself continually surprised at the direction my life has taken. I never thought of myself as a scholar. I never once made an explicit decision to become an analytical philosopher or a policy analyst. I always thought I was a politician, first and foremost. Now it may be that my frustrations in politics, and my choice to abandon the pursuit of elective office, made it inevitable that my life would take a different course than the one I'd intended. But if you'd asked me ten years ago to predict what my life would look like now, the only thing I would have gotten right was that I would be happily married to Dr. Brazen Hussy.

Maybe that provides the clue. You can't be with a person as interesting as she is and not be changed by it. I've grown up, certainly, but I also think I've grown out - physically and emotionally. For the first time in my life I'm taking some pleasure in the day to day, which I was never any good at before. I eat good food and drink good booze, I travel, but I also do more than just talk all the time (which I still do, just ask BH!) - I'm finally acting on some of those intentions I'd always had.

So I guess I should let this blog follow it's natural evolution and thank my wonderful wife for helping me learn how to live. I don't think I ever would have learned that on my own.

Another Existential Writing Crisis

2010-11-29T09:57:00.003-05:00

I just wrapped up another chapter of my novel last week and decided to do a quick word count to see how long it is so far. Now I tend to be a bit gabby when I write, so I expected it to be too long. But not THIS long. Right now if one uses the standard "word count" function on Word all the text together is about 160,000 words long. I've read that publishers are generally unwilling to consider books that are more than 100K words long. Now I'm sure that the editing process will result in massive cuts to the length, but even if I cut HALF the text it would still be 80K - when I'm probably only 3/5 to 2/3 the way through the story.

This is a problem.

Now my goal in writing this book has never been just to write something that can be published. It's a story that's been kicking in my head for years and I wanted to see if I could tell it. Plus, I just like writing. However, I don't want to write something that definitely CAN'T be published, which is where I seem to be headed at the moment.

I'm left with a number of different possibilities:

1) I could just continue as I have been and worry about this problem when I finish the story. The downside of this is that it might result in a ton more work at the end of the process.

2) I could re-cast the book as a series of shorter novels, with the first book a relatively self-contained whole. This wouldn't be too hard, since the first portion has most of the key elements I'd need for a shorter story. I'd have to do some re-writing and shift some things around, and probably flesh out a few sections, but it's doable. The upside of this approach is that I'd have a book finished by middle of next year. The downside is that I had hoped to avoid writing a series. Maybe it IS impossible to get sci-fi stories down to a single book.

3) I could make a major effort to cut down the story now and see if I can get what I've written so far to an appropriate length without mutilating the narrative. This would force me to stop writing entirely for a while and just focus on editing, which I'm loathe to do. But it also might force me to focus on what truly is essential. If I make the attempt and fail, I could always revert to option #2.

I suppose ultimately what I need to decide is what sort of story this is. Is it an epic requiring multiple volumes? Or can it be distilled into a single work? Does the fact that it has shifted from the latter represent a natural evolution I should respect? Or does it just mean that I've lost control of myself?

Something tells me that I'm not the first amateur novelist to have this problem.

The Weird, Wussy Alternate Reality Me

2010-11-21T11:02:00.006-05:00

I have to admit that in professional situations I am a rather timid person. I'm not sure, but I think it stems from a paranoia about losing my job (which in turn derives from an obsession with going bankrupt). When we move I have these great fears I won't find a job, and when I DO find a job I'm convinced that my employer will fire me at the drop of a hat. Of course, it doesn't help that I have seen my co-workers fired for no discernible reason and without warning. I might be less paranoid if my supervisors ever told us why people left the company, but that would alleviate everyone's anxieties and what would be the fun in that?

Anyway, as a consequence I am constantly letting myself be taken advantage of. At any request, no matter how absurd, I'm like "Sure! No problem!" A report written from scratch in two weeks? No problem! A proposal I've never heard of by the end of the day? Done! An op-ed for a major newspaper in three days? Why not!

This is how I ended up working 60 hours a week at my last job. Every time I was asked to do something, I agreed to it, so my bosses must have thought "wow, he can handle anything!" and gave me more and more and more work to do - to the point that I couldn't sleep and started losing my hair and realized I'm drinking 40 gallons of coffee a day.

Since BH gets a new job and takes me to a new and interesting part of the country every few years, there's always the excitement (read: terror) of finding a new job. And at the beginning I say to myself, "Self, this time you will stand up to your employers and not let them treat you like doo-doo." I mean, they're not really going to fire me if I say no, right? Of course, every time I end up making all the same mistakes I made last time. Last week I was asked to write something for a journal without a promise that I would get any credit for it, and despite the fact that I knew I was probably getting screwed, I said "Sure!" Idiot.

What's so strange about this is that in most parts of my life I always thought I was a very strong person. I like sticking up for myself. I like arguing and making a fuss. I am generally NOT a conflict-avoider. In fact I am frequently the "designated asshole" in social situations. One good example is the time we were waiting for a table at a crowded restaurant. The previous diners were already finished - they'd paid and everything - but they wouldn't leave. The poor waitress was practically in tears. So I walked up and politely asked them when they were going to be finished, since they were clearly done and we needed the table and you just don't hog tables in New York City during Sunday brunch. Or another time I was stuck behind a car that was trying to turn left onto a crowded street at rush hour with no light. Finally I turned my car off, got out, and told the driver that he should turn right and make a u-turn because otherwise we'd be here all day. It drives my wife crazy when I do things like this. But at my job? I'm just a wuss.

Maybe now that BH is making boatloads of money I'll finally be able to get over my bad social habits at work.

But I doubt it.

Big Talk, No Action

2010-11-18T09:17:00.002-05:00

Last night I went to a local party function. A portion of the event was re-hashing the party's defeat in the recent elections. What was interesting to me was the division between a) those who wanted to focus on blaming the Obama administration for the defeat and the things he needs to do to fix it, and b) people who wanted to talk about how we could reorganize headed into the next elections. Despite my criticisms of Obama's political strategy, I was definitely in the latter camp, but I found it sad how few people want to use our leverage at the local level to apply indirect pressure on the administration. Writing letters to the White House isn't going to accomplish anything. Presenting your member of Congress with a room of pissed off party veterans - the people they need to get elected - is something else entirely.

Of course, I'd been in many similar meetings over the years - where everyone says all the right things about organizing at the precinct level and not waiting until 6 weeks before an election to talk to voters. I've heard this after victories and after defeats, and all it ever is is talk. Two months later the momentum is lost and we're right back where we started, cobbling together a slapdash campaign effort just before the election composed of grandmothers and college students.

I also heard the usual claptrap about reaching out to younger voters. Well, perhaps "claptrap" is being a bit unfair, but I ask you - how much sense does it make to spend (scarce) resources getting 20 year college students involved when they're going to move out of town in 2 years? I'm all for trying to strengthen College Democratic organizations, but seriously - you are not going to build a long-term base for the party by relying on the sometimes enthusiasm of teenagers.

Basically I've decided to be a pain in the butt - something I have a talent for. My pan is to introduce plans for getting precinct captains to work their areas on a regular basis, get it approved by the party, and get said precinct captains to sign a pledge. I'm going to nag and wheedle and cajole (do those all mean the same thing?). I'm already talking to the incoming county party chair to develop a more aggressive media strategy, but also to take strong stances on local and state issues. I'm not interested in passing resolutions and then forgetting about it - the point is to use these issues as a way to communicate with our voters.

Mainly I'm going to try to remind people what they said last night, and remind them of how bad they felt on November 2nd. If they don't want to feel that way again in two years, they need to do something about it now. Because then I won't be blaming Obama (or not just Obama). It'll be our fault too.

Getting up off the mat

2010-11-10T09:33:00.002-05:00

So Democrats feel dispirited about the results of the election? Our base doesn't know what we stand for anymore? We got killed among seniors in the last cycle? Well here's a wonderful opportunity to remind Americans why we need a Democratic Party: protecting social security from being plundered by Wall Street. Democrats should contact their representatives, sure, but they should also contact elected officials and party officials below the national level. Put pressure on them to announce their position on social security cuts as well, because if you can get them to make a public statement the congressional incumbent is going to have to start worrying about a primary challenge.

And yes, that includes Obama.

Where We Go From Here

2010-11-05T13:56:00.002-04:00

You'd think after the shellacking the Democrats took on Tuesday, I'd be depressed. Strangely enough, like Susie Madrak, I'm pretty excited. I expected to be down in the dumps for weeks, like I was after the 2004 elections, but instead my brain is bubbling with ideas about what to do next and I'm ready to go. I feel liberated. Most of all, I feel ready to go to war.

In the past few years I've held back a little from politics. I've certainly been involved, but only in a fairly low-key way. I helped candidates when I could, I gave advice to the ones that won, but I stayed very much behind the scenes in local politics. Part of that was because of my job, I suppose, and part of it was because I didn't know how long I'd be in town, but I think the most important element was simply my timidity. I just didn't have the appetite for it that I'd had in New York. You wouldn't think that a crushing electoral defeat would make me hungry for politics again, but as many intimates over the years have told me, I'm just not like other people.

Let me tell you what I'm NOT going to do. I'm not going to spend a great deal of time obsessing over what Barack Obama is going to do. I don't have any control over what he does. His decisions are going to have an effect on what happens to me, but I have no leverage over the White House and even less trust that he'll make the right decisions. I think there's more than a little reason to suspect that Obama simply has extremely poor political instincts. He's the President I have and I'll live with him, but basically I've written him off.

What I AM going to do is get organized. I think that the biggest failures that liberals (or "progressives" if you prefer) have made over the last few years is reacting to political events in scattershot way. After the 2008 election we had tremendous momentum, but we left it up to elected officials to carry the load. Predictably, without external pressure they failed to deliver. That's not how politics works. I'm going to organize within the party, sure - it's the only useful vehicle for reform - but I'm not going to focus simple-mindedly on electing more Democrats to office. I'm not just going to volunteer to help one person get elected or do GOTV for the national party. I'm going to stay involved.

So I have two plans. First, I'm going to get myself elected a precinct captain and build a political organization the old fashioned way: personal contacts. For some reason nobody does this anymore - it's all kids doing lit drops on election day. That's crap. We need people who make contact with the Democrats and swing voters in their district every year, building the personal rapport that will make GOTV and voter persuasion ever so much easier. You can't wait until three months before the election. The only way to build trust is to make it a continuing effort. There's all sorts of ways to do this - do a precinct voter registration drive, circulate a petition, whatever. The point is get to know your voters. I'm going to take this responsibility on in my own precinct, and I'm going to push to get activists in other precincts to do the same.

Second, I'm going to try to get the local party to get more aggressive about message. Typically the county party leadership just focuses on the nuts and bolts of preparing for campaigns - they don't ask people to get and stay involved (refer to plan #1) and they don't have much media presence. This is a huge mistake. Liberals need to aggressively push their issues using the party structure as a vehicle. Beyond this, liberals should identify political issues relevant to their community and have the party take a stand. I don't mean some silly resolution. I mean actually going out and lobbying, writing letters, holding press conferences, writing press releases, and talking to voters about the issues of the day. Not only with this put pressure on elected officials to do the right thing, but it also serves a tactical purpose. They can deliver the red meat to their base and attack conservatives, letting the elected stay above the fray.

Let me say a word or two about holding candidates accountable. One of our biggest problems is that we're not specific enough. If liberals identified 2 or 3 issues they were going to use as litmus tests in every contest, they would find it much easier to get elected officials to follow through. Laundry lists make us seem like dilettantes. Heck, there's no reason we can't have elected official sign a pledge and then go to the press with it.

Those are just the outlines of what I have in mind. Now I fully expect that the Democrats are going to have a tough year in 2012, because I don't think the economy is going to recover. But we're going to be MUCH better off if we get started now - because 2013-2014 could very well be the high water mark for the Republicans that 2009-2010 was for us. And I would dearly love to repay the favor.

Oh, I See. NOW They Care.

2010-10-25T18:05:00.003-04:00

Some of us having been harping about campaign finance reform, well, since forever. And we're always told that it's too boring, too technical, that the voters don't care about it, that it's a "process story" and we should focus on more important things.

Then the Supreme Court guts a century of campaign finance laws and the Democrats get buried under an avalanche of undisclosed corporate ads. And suddenly it's an issue.

I'd be full of self-satisfaction at being vindicated if the consequences weren't so appalling. It's not this electoral cycle I'm concerned so much about. It's the survival of the republic.

Idiots.

Meme

2010-10-23T09:42:00.003-04:00

Hey, it's been ages since I did one of these. Seen lots of places:

1. What is your favorite word?
perspicacious

2. What is your least favorite word?
ubiquitous

3. What turns you on?
poise

4. What turns you off?
high-pitched laughing

5. What is your favorite curse word?
f$#k

6. What sound or noise do you love?
a cat purring

7. What sound or noise do you hate?
my bird screaming

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
historian

9. What profession would you not like to try?
stockbroker

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
good start

Hey, wait a minute, aren't these the questions James Lipton always asks his guests on Inside the Actor's Studio?

Bipartisanship and Question-Begging

2010-10-22T06:21:00.002-04:00

Politics is about enemies. It's not pleasant to say it, but it's a reality. I'm not speaking about exploiting deep-seated racial, gender, and homophobic elements in society. It's really quite a bit more general than that. The only way one can get someone to the polls is to give them a stake in the election. Now sometimes this can be an affirmational vote, such as the vote of a lot of young people about Obama in 2008. But more often one needs more than this, if for no other reason than voting entails costs and there's not some perception of risk from not voting - as in you're screwed if the other side wins - then a lot of people are going to stay home. Especially when times are the bad, you need to pin the blame on somebody. If you don't, your opponents are going to pin the blame on you.

Which is where we are with the long-standing village obsession with bipartisanship. If partisanship is the problem, then nobody is really at fault - it's just 2 kids squabbling over crap in the schoolyard. It's nice for the media and the D.C. elite to hold partisanship responsible for the country's problems, or the voters, because it means that they don't have to look at themselves in the mirror, because it assigns responsibility nowhere. The voters aren't going to buy it, of course. They never have. So Obama's focus on bipartisanship has enabled Republicans to define a whole bunch of other enemies in American society - liberals, "socialists", immigrants, muslims, etc. - in part because Obama refused to assign the blame where it really belonged: conservative Republicans. He could have used their obstruction to fix them in the public mind as the defenders of the status quo. But he didn't, and here we are.

The dispirited Democrats are without a clear agenda to run on, which leaves us with only one message heading into the general election: that the Republicans are a bunch of psychos. Now this has the virtue of being true, but it would easier to make the case if Obama and his friends has been laying the groundwork for the last 2 years. Thankfully so many Republicans running for office are so looney the job is still doable, but a dose of political reality from the White House in January 2009 sure would have been nice.

What The Hell Are We Going To Do About This?

2010-10-19T07:51:00.002-04:00

A good question from Digby. In light of the fountain of lies being spewed from TV sets all over the country, paid for by anonymous - and even foreign - corporate donors, and the abject failure of the press to notice that a lie is a lie, one has to wonder at the long-term health of the republic. If we live in a state whose elections are influenced (I'll take the optimistic case and just call it influence) by wealthy interests, some of them not even located in the United States, how are we ever going to fix the mess we're in? Money is not the be-all and end-all of politics - lots of candidates spend more money and still lose, but together with the other structural advantages enjoyed by Republicans, it has to make you wonder whether we are ever going to be able to end the remorseless concentration of wealth and power that is slowly turning this country into a banana republic. My only hope is that eventually there will be sufficient public disgust that we can turn the tide. Regrettably such social movements have always required leaders.

And it is here that we have a problem. It's not that there aren't policy levers we could use to mitigate the influence of corporate money in politics: we could require shareholders to vote on contributions, strengthen disclosure laws, even campaign for a constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood (which might be easier to persuade people of than a direct campaign finance amendment, given the widespread if wrongheaded concerns about free speech). But who is going to champion such a movement? The Democratic Party is nearly as in thrall to well-heeled groups as the Republicans, a situation that will only grow worse as unions continue to decay and old-style new deal liberals are replaced by neoliberal ones. Money is even more important in primaries than in general elections, you see.

It's going to be long road. Those of us who recognize the danger need to start talking about, to lay out the argument in a clear way, and to follow up what we say with concrete political action. We have to make the funding of political campaigns - scratch that, the financing of american politics , into major political issue.

Milestone

2010-10-11T11:42:00.001-04:00

I just submitted my first article for peer review as a first author. Better late than never.

Evidence of Incompetence

2010-09-29T07:19:00.003-04:00

There's a fascinating debate going on over at Talking Points Memo. You might have heard that Barack Obama recently criticized liberals for being disengaged from the election. Obama's comments have sparked both rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. Blogging heavyweights like Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein have chimed in, arguing that civil libertarians have every reason to be outraged but other sorts of liberals really ought to be more understanding of the constraints liberal presidents have to operate under. Finally, I think Greg Sargent gets the closest to the truth when he notes that some of the criticism is tactical - that it is politically advantageous to fight the occasional battle on behalf of liberal causes even if you lose.

Here's my take on things. First, there is going to be some fall-off in enthusiasm after any election, particularly when the economy is still in the dumps. Not all of that can be laid at Obama's doorstep. Second, Obama's position on civil liberties is simply appalling - he is effectively consolidating the Bush agenda and undermining the republic. I will never forgive him for it.

Third, the White House's inability to recognize the political benefits of picking symbolic issues to take a stand on is simply stunning, and points to how imbecilic their political strategy is. From day one Obama has proved manifestly incapable to develop and implement a coherent messaging strategy. I've watched opportunity after opportunity pass by to put the Republicans on the defensive and to rally Democrats behind the administration, but they seem to have an allergy to partisan combat. It is this reluctance to battle against right-wing conservatism that is contributing to the demoralization of the Democratic party.

I've said it a million times, but liberals really aren't that hard to please. Pick a few substantive issues where liberal positions are generally popular and fight for them (the recent tax cut debate is a good example). Even if the Republicans obstruct and we don't get what we want, liberals will remember that you were with them when it counted. We don't expect you to fight to the death on every issues, but fight on something. Pick something, anything, about which you won't compromise. You won't be sorry.

And For My Next Trick

2010-09-27T15:52:00.002-04:00

As promised, my long-awaited change of subject:

We recently moved to another state. The process was a bit staggered, as first BH and then I had to go back and forth, but now we are both here and beginning the long and decidedly strange process of "settling in." The evolution of a house that one is living in into a home is a pretty strange one. The feeling of being "at home" is amorphous, but there are some sure signs that one has arrived. When one wakes up in the morning and knows where one is is one sign. Others include: being able to open the correct kitchen cabinet the first time, knowing where the light switches are, to be able to get around in the dark (or half-light). Remembering where to put your shoes or your keys or your wallet when you get home in another good one. These are tiny but profoundly important things that amount to "comfort." I'm not there yet, of course. I still have something of that spacey feeling you get when you're in someone else's house all alone. But I'm getting there.

Where Do I Sign Up?

2010-09-27T10:23:00.002-04:00

If someone credible challenges Obama in the primaries in 2012, sign me up to help them. I am officially off the boat.

Structural Stupidity

2010-09-27T07:45:00.002-04:00

Okay one more slightly dreary post about politics and then I'm going to change the subject. The recent tax cut debate is an excellent example of what's wrong with the country and with the Democratic Party. From a strict policy perspective, this is an easy call. There's been a massive increase in inequality over the last generation and the only way to balance the books is to tax the upper crust. Middle incomes have been stagnating for decades and the economy is depressed, so I can see the sense in continuing their tax cuts (although tax cuts don't have a great stimulative effect, at least it's something). Politically, this was as easy a case as Josh Marshall has been claiming - Republicans are weakened when they're perceived as the party of the rich and this vote was a great opportunity to do it. But the Democrats can't get it done, and the reasons why tell you everything you need to know about why the U.S. is in very deep doo-doo.

There are four explanations as to why Democrats wouldn't hold this vote - explanations which aren't mutually exclusive. I'll list them in order of worry. The first is that Democrats thought they could take the tax issue off the table - that if they held a vote they'd be attacked for raising taxes. Of course, they'll be attacked for it anyway, so this is a good testament about how politically incompetent a fair proportion of Democratic congressman are. There's at least a possibility that they could learn from their mistakes, but I'm not hopeful.

The second explanation is that Democratic congressman believe that loading goodies onto rich people is a substantively good idea. Which means they're functionally Republicans, suffering from cognitive capture, hopelessly out of touch, or some mix of them. Also not a good thing.

The third explanation is that they're corrupt. They don't want to alienate well-heeled interests because they want cushy job once they're out of office - something which is likely to happen in about 3 months. Corruption is hard to deal with, intractable even, but the country has had bouts of widespread corruption before so although a very bad thing it's not the end of the world.

The fourth is that Democrats don't want to vote against the interests of the wealthy because they're concerned about alienating wealthy interests. This is somewhat distinct from point four because it's a product of fear rather than greed. They are terrified of losing campaign contributions - almost all of which come from the wealthy, who are disproportionately conservative - and of negative attack ads by corporations and right-wing groups. They don't want to get buried in mud the week before the election, so they think they can insulate themselves or at least limit the damage by going along.

Which brings me to my ever-present obsession, campaign finance. I think at least part of this is all tied up in the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. The fact is that given the amount of money that is now going to flow through the political system, it is now a rational (if horrific) decision for Democratic candidates for congress to completely sell themselves to corporate power. If they don't they will be defeated, or at least buy themselves a very, very difficult race. If they do they might get yelled at by their liberal base, but with sufficient money and some clever maneuvering they can probably limit their chance of getting knocked off in a primary. So these Democrats are making the strategic decision to become Republicans on economic issues for all intents and purposes.

Which means that fixing the problem of the wealthy plundering the middle class is probably unsolvable. We now have a system in which corporations and wealthy conservative economic interests now have so many structural advantages that they are nigh-invincible. Combined with the de facto co-option of the media into this congregation of economically conservative interests, we will now be in something very like the situation of the 19th century: the differences between the parties will be cultural rather than economic, and those cultural cleavages will be exacerbated over time as a response to growing economic turmoil.

I'm not saying that this situation can NEVER be fixed. If the economy gets bad enough long enough something will change - there will be sufficient popular outrage that no amount of commercials will stop the political firestorm that will result. But I should emphasize that such a moment wouldn't necessarily result in another liberal bout of reform such as we saw in the early 1900's or the 1930's. There is plenty of historical evidence that such popular anger can be directed into right-wing channels (hence fascism), or that faced with the real possibility or reform the right will resort to dictatorship in order to preserve their privileges (as we've seen in Latin America time and time again).

I'm not saying the republic is doomed. We're not Rome in the 60's B.C. But the patient has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease, and if those of us who recognize the illness don't begin to pull ourselves together the prognosis could well prove terminal.

America's Coming Ride on the Teabag Express

2010-09-18T09:01:00.002-04:00

My life has slowed down sufficiently that I can start to re-engage with the world around me. BH and I recently moved to a new state, so I have to get all re-registered to vote so I can go to war with those lunatics in the Republican Party this fall. I confess, I've seen some crazy stuff over the years, but the Teabagger takeover of the Republican Party might be the most alarming. It's easy to be cynical about it. A lot of Democrats are saying "those candidates are so wacky that there's no way they'll win." I wish that were true. They'll underperform compared with a more moderate candidate, but the fundamental dynamics of the election are so hostile to Democrats that quite a few of them get into office. From a political science point of view, this election is a major test whether the retrospective or median voter models of vote choice are accurate. Since I generally adhere to the former - the latter assumes that enough voters know a lot about issues and candidates - I think that we're have a substantial Teabag Caucus in Congress next year. What's also interesting is that in the past ideology hasn't played that much of a role in primaries, and establishment figures have generally been able to win because of their superior institutional support. What we're seeing now is a right-wing uprising in the Republican Party. The leadership has completely lost control. Well, the part of the leadership we're used to seeing anyway - I suspect that part of this is one faction of the Republican elite supporting and exploiting the teabaggers to win power within the party. God help us all. Even if the Democrats were to benefit from the nomination of all these loonies, we'd still have a major political party in thrall to a neo-fascist political movement.

Why I Think Obama Is A Poor Politician

2010-08-26T09:04:00.003-04:00

Alan Simpson, former Senator and co-chair of the deficit commission, said that Social Security was "a milk cow with 310 million tits." When criticized, Simpson apologies for the tone. By the way, he's been a critic of Social Security for decades.

What Obama does: accept his apology. Which ticks off his base, will raise fears that Obama will go along with Social Security cuts, and limit Democrats' opportunity to use social security as an issue in the fall.

What I would have done: fire Simpson, vigorously defend Social Security, and claim that the budget will not be balanced on the backs of seniors who have been paying their social security taxes for decades. Have my allies in Congress introduce bills strengthening social security by lifting the cap on high incomes and dare the Republicans to vote against it.

Why the difference in approach? I like winning. Obama likes making David Broder happy.

I Object

2010-08-23T18:39:00.003-04:00

I was burned out on politics after 2008. I had invested so much emotional energy into ending the Bush era that I longed for a quieter period of competent stewardship. I expected Obama to give me that, and in my fairer moments I suspect that he has done his best to do so. For a year and a half public affairs have been in the corner of my eye - I was aware of what was happening, but not really engaged in it. I carped at the pusillanimity of the Democratic Party, I made snide remarks about one false political move after another, I grunted at the developing corruption of our public dialogue, and I watched warily the evolving madness of the Teabaggers. I'm a student of history, and most especially of the making and breaking of republics. I know what counter-revolutionaries look like.

I'd kept away from the debate over the so-called "ground zero mosque." I thought it absurd, fundamentally hostile to our political traditions and our national interest. Build it, I say, and you silence our critics and reaffirm what is best about us. Who could be so stupid to oppose it, who so irresponsible as to fan the flames of religious discord? Well now I know.

I think it's time to set aside my weariness, my disgust with my own purported leaders, and my any other stupid meaningless crap. First the Arizona law, and now this. They've gone entirely too far.

A Very Quick Note While I Take A Work Break

2010-08-23T14:00:00.003-04:00

Hi everybody. I'm clearly a very bad blogger, but unlike my better half I don't have any immediate plans to retire my blog. Lately we've been rushing around getting ready for our move. The last time we moved to another state we were living in a one-bedroom apartment, and now we're in a 3-bedroom house, so you can imagine how much more stuff we have. Next time I'm definitely going to look into having the moving company pack for me!

Do you know how when you've given your notice at a job things gradually tail off so that you're sitting around with nothing to do? Well I don't. If anything my workload has gotten heavier, which on top of the move and looking for a job has made my life crazy busy.

I should really get back to working on this paper, but let me leave you with this link, which I think highlights very accurately the problems with an anti-gay marriage position (here).

Not Dead Yet

2010-08-02T18:27:00.002-04:00

Just very busy. You may have heard that BH got a Dream Job, which means we are moving. Which means we have to pack. And that I have to find a new job. But despite the minor difficulties, I'm still thrilled. It's impossible to be prouder of a person than I am of my wife.

And on a lighter note, there is now some evidence to her contention that drinking makes you smarter.