walk on

making dessert

2012-02-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

John decided to help mommy make brownies last night.

the conservative case for obama, continued

2012-02-18T06:00:00.000-05:00

Any conservative case for President Obama has to account for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. How could conservatives possibly defend a 787 billion dollar stimulus bill? One of the difficulties here is that very few of us have any economic expertise, and so we end up appealing to authority, which is not a very good argument. But the following basic sketch of where we were 3 years ago is generally acknowledged and makes the best sense of the data.

By the end of 2008, the United States was reeling from the collapse of not one, but at least two hugely important parts of the economy: housing/construction, and the financial sector. The collapse of housing/construction threw a lot of people out of work and took trillions of dollars of wealth down with it as housing values declined and foreclosures spiked. Meanwhile the financial system was at a near total standstill. No one could get loans. And a modern economy cannot function without credit.

The result of this was that consumer demand fell through the floor. 70% of U.S. economic activity is us going to walmart and buying stuff, or purchasing a new washer, or car, of going out to eat. But at the end of 2008, with tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs every single day, people quite sensibly stopped buying and started saving. But this feeds a vicious cycle. People lose their jobs, causing them to spend less money, which reduces business activity, which leads to more lay-offs. If this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, there is no particular place it has to stop. Unemployment can go up into the 20-30% range, as it did during the Great Depression.

So that's where we were when President Obama took office. Thus the theory behind the stimulus was clear: prop up demand so that fewer people lose their jobs and it doesn't become a self-reinforcing cycle. Economists understand that in the long-term how money is spent, and whether it is through the private or public sector, is important. But in the midst of economic crisis the economy doesn't know or care where the demand comes from. Someone needs to spend money! It is vital for we non-economists to understand that our intuitive sense that all institutions should tighten their belts and save money during hard times just like we as individuals do is horribly wrong. It's natural that we would think that way, but if you give it a little more consideration, it's an obvious fallacy.

Let's zoom out. During the height of this crisis, there was a real danger that our whole capitalist system would implode. If the banks had been allowed to fail (that's another subject) it is impossible to predict how the resulting chaos would have played out. Suffice it to say, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are child's play compared to the anger that would have been on the street. So conservatives should have been thinking about how best to preserve our economic system. How can we keep people employed, allowing them to feed their families and live in dignity? As a general rule, of course massive bailouts and governments spending is not conservative! But these were not normal circumstances. An ideological rigidity that leads to catastrophic unemployment and discrediting of capitalism itself does not sound very conservative either. Conservatism cannot mean an inability to respond to crisis.

Now frankly, the stimulus wasn't designed very well. It was pushed through quickly, with too many long-held democratic wishes that weren't particularly good at creating demand. But a large part of that poor design was due to President Obama's efforts to get conservatives on board. Most conservatives don't realize that over 300 billion of the 787 billion price tag was tax cuts and credits. True to form, though Obama insisted on getting something passed, he was pragmatic enough to include many Republican ideas.

And here's perhaps what is most important to know. Many of us have spent so much time in the right-wing echo chamber that we're unaware that economists think the stimulus worked. The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, which is, by the way, known for its conservatism, polled dozens of the nations leading economists about the stimulus. When asked if the unemployment rate was lower than it would be without the stimulus, only 4% disagreed. When asked to take into account all the future costs associated with the stimulus, including taxes to pay back the debt, only 12% thought the costs of the stimulus would end up exceeding the stimulus.

One other item that should be cleared up. A lot of people on the right have bought into a horribly misleading argument about the nature of this economic downturn. They point out that the last time unemployment got this high, in the early '80s under Reagan, the economy bounced back very fast and employment shot back up. This, they say, shows that all this government spending actually delays recovery. There are two types of people who make this argument: liars and those who don't know any better. The recession of the early 1980s was literally caused on purpose by the federal reserve to finally break the back of inflation, which had been running way too high. The Fed simply raised interest rates, causing a sharp contraction in the economy and a spike in unemployment. When it was satisfied inflation was under control, it simply lowered the rates and the economy came roaring back. It should be obvious that this time was different. For the first time since the 1930s, whole sectors of the U.S. economy collapsed. It's a completely different situation. And economists have done some good work showing that recovery from financial crises takes much, much longer. In fact, as this graph shows, by historical standards we've fared rather well this time.

Again, if we return to my original description of what defines conservatism, we see that it describes President Obama better than his opponents in this case. An opposition to ideological rigidity and extremism, a pragmatic approach to preserving the best of what brought us here -- this is what President Obama's actions to help the economy looked like. It does not describe men like Rick Santorum who advocated ideological purity even if it would be more harmful to capitalism.

the conservative case for obama

2012-02-16T20:00:00.000-05:00

A commenter on my last post encouraged me to go into greater detail in defense of my claim that "President Obama is more conservative (in the sense I've just described) than any of the Republican candidates." There are certainly any number of approaches one could take to this question, and I won't even try to be comprehensive. But I think to sort of put some concreteness to this theoretical claim, it might help to start with the health care law.

I think the Affordable Care Act is a good starting point because the president's opponents seem to agree that it, more than anything else, shows his radicalism. If we can show that this, his signature piece of legislation, is not particularly radical at all, then it calls for a reappraisal of his entire presidency.

It's worth noting some background that many conservatives, to this day, remain unaware of. The idea of universal health insurance coverage in America has been kicked around for the better part of 100 years. Presidents Nixon, Carter, and Clinton all had serious proposals to enact universal coverage, but all failed to get them passed. So when President Obama set out to get it done in 2009, he took a more cautious and less transformative approach than all of those former attempts.

In fact, President Obama was so pragmatic about it that one of the core features of the law, the individual mandate, was borrowed from the Heritage Foundation, the rock-ribbed conservative think tank. Conservatives had promoted the mandate as a way to prevent free-riders in our health care system. Rather than offloading the cost onto the rest of us when they get sick and go to the ER, the uninsured would have to take responsibility for their health by purchasing insurance or paying a yearly fee. As soon as President Obama adopted this idea, however, conservatives no longer looked at it through the prism of personal responsibility. Now it is all about governmental coercion.

In other respects, the law is also careful to implement change incrementally. Rather than instituting a socialized system in which the government owns hospitals and doctors are government employees, President Obama left the private insurance market intact. Instead of creating a bunch of new programs, the law extends coverage to millions through the existing Medicaid program, and helps others comply with the mandate through subsidies. In short, the Affordable Care Act is bringing universal coverage to America in about the least disruptive way one could imagine, and with significant deference for existing systems and institutions. (Of course, the more outlandish claims about Obamacare being socialism are thus hard to defend. If it is socialism, conservatives ought to ask themselves why so many of them promoted it in the 1990s).

One may well argue that it doesn't matter how many Republican ideas were borrowed to make this law. Isn't the real question whether or not universal health coverage is an inherently unconservative agenda? After all, if you're a conservative and you want to enact universal coverage, it would be really hard to do it in a significantly more conservative way than President Obama has already done it. But perhaps, if you're a real conservative, you wouldn't try it at all.

But I don't see why you wouldn't. In my mind, conservatism is about preserving the best of what has brought us here, while pragmatically pursuing incremental change, preferably based on proven results. Most of the developed world has had universal health care for decades, and it's been shown to work. Finally moving in that direction, while preserving the core of our current system, hardly seems unreasonable. If it's unconservative, it is unconservative in the same way that child labor laws, women's suffrage, and so on were once unconservative. I think that conservatism that cannot make room for an idea whose time has come, that cannot adjust to new social realities, is simply reactionary radicalism.

It strikes me that this reactionary radicalism is what characterizes the the President's opponents. They swept into office in 2010 promising to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Thus far they have submitted half a dozen repeal bills, and have done nothing on the "replace" front. That is because they do not have a plan for people with preexisting conditions, for example. There is much in this law that is popular and compassionate and doable since we're such a rich society, and the Republicans propose to repeal it all and have not offered any real plan to deal with the actual changes that have happened in the American health care system in the last few decades. Conservatism should stand for respecting the past, not living in it.

Well, this turned out to be entirely about the Affordable Care Act, leaving much left to say about the broader question. Perhaps I will write more later.

jesse, a conservative? c'mon!

2012-02-14T22:00:00.000-05:00

Rod Dreher, a conservative blogger I've been reading lately, had a thoughtful post today about why he is a conservative. He asked his readers to go beyond the political questions of the moment and consider the philosophical beliefs that cause them to identify as conservatives, liberals, or something else. I'll answer that question briefly, and if anyone here wants to answer it as well, I would be fascinated to hear your response. First, Dreher is worth quoting almost in full:

I am a conservative because I believe that the conservative political and cultural tradition offers the most accurate way of understanding how the world works, and helping people organize their affairs, personally and in community, in a morally sound and rational way. I am a conservative because I am convinced of the reality of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, and believe that conservatism, broadly understood, proceeds from the understanding that humankind is imperfectible and tragic. I am a conservative because I am skeptical of utopia, and the ability of human reason to comprehend the deepest nature of things. Tradition — however flawed — is the surest guide to the affairs of men, because it has been tested. I am a conservative because I am a Christian, and find that in this time, and in this place, my religious convictions place me, however uneasily, on the side of those who call themselves conservative. I am a conservative because I believe Russell Kirk was right when he said that “the institution that it’s most important to conserve is the family” — and because I believe conservatism offers the best means of resistance against the cultural forces tearing the family apart. I believe that society is better understood as an organic entity, not as a collection of rights-bearing individuals who relate to each other contractually.

I am a conservative in spite of what contemporary American conservatism stands for in some cases. I am more skeptical of the free market than many (most?) of my fellow conservatives, because I believe the market, the most powerful anti-conservative force that ever was, is a good, but a conditional good. I am more in favor of environmental regulations than many (most?) conservatives because I believe that we have a moral and religious responsibility to treat Creation with respect, and to be good stewards of the land, not clever exploiters. I have become far, far more skeptical of the foreign policy views of leading conservatives, because I recognize the Right has given itself over to the crusading abstractions of Nationalism and American Exceptionalism — this, in contradiction to what conservative philosophy and conservative instincts tell us about human nature.

Yet I remain a conservative not only because my philosophical and moral views are conservative, but because I cannot find a home among liberals. I am generalizing here, but I do not share the liberal view that the world can be remade as we desire. I do not have the liberal faith in the inherent goodness of mankind, and in big-r Reason. I believe liberals (and many conservatives) place far too much confidence in science and technology, and in a technological “solution” to our problems...

I am a conservative because I do not believe in Progress — or rather, I believe progress is possible, but is always fragile, and usually brings with it a new set of problems...
I would say, then, that an open-minded person should consider conservatism because it is realistic, and likelier to come closer to the truth of things than its rivals. Conservatism recognizes the existence of limits, and it alone is informed by the tragic sense of life. This sense causes conservatives to at times be insensitive to wrongs that can be righted, or ought to be more forcefully addressed — segregation is the prime example here — but this is a more reliable instinct than the liberal one that led to the Great Society. It all goes back to how one views human nature, and the nature of truth. I would say to this person to think about history, and what history tells us humankind is, and what Progressive, Modernist ideas about the malleability of human nature and the nature of reality led us to in the 20th century. To reckon with this fairly, I think, is to make one a conservative.

It may not make one a Republican. I would say also to this person that he should not expect that the so-called conservative party in this country is conservative in a real philosophical sense; in most ways, the GOP is the party of conservative liberals. I would say, though, that you can find a home on the Right, however far to the margins you will have to pitch your tent, while among the Left, people who hold the religious views and philosophical convictions that I do will always be in hostile territory.

Finally, I think conservatism, as I’ve described it here, runs counter to the American mind and the American spirit, which is classically liberal (in both its right-wing and left-wing iterations), individualistic, optimistic, and crusading. Liberalism in power gave us Vietnam. Conservatism in power gave us Iraq. Americanism gave us both. The only philosophical ground I can find to make a stand against that sort of thing is on the Right, however alien this kind of conservatism is in this land.

My guess is that most readers will be surprised when I say that I agree with this almost completely. I too believe in original sin and think the family is the most important unit of society. I too am skeptical of America's aggressive foreign policy consensus. I also don't have much patience for utopianism and I recognize the frailty of progress. Nor, as I look at history and see how often our "common sense" was wrong and how regularly our "solutions" have produced unintended consequences, do I have much confidence in the efficacy of technocratic fixes.

In all of these ways I am conservative. If I were to distill it into one truth, it would be this: I find ideological extremism dangerous. Humans commit great evil when an abstraction becomes so important it causes us to mistreat the person standing right in front of us. It could be Stalinism, but really, it could be, and has been, just about anything. When Jesus healed a man on the sabbath, and the pharisees decried a broken rule rather than celebrating a restored human being, they showed themselves to be ideological extremists.

The fascinating thing is that Rod Dreher and I, and I suspect many of my readers, share so many of these foundational beliefs but currently make their home in opposing parties. What's wrong with me, you ask? Well, this is probably mind-blowing to some, but I argue that President Obama is more conservative (in the sense I've just described) than any of the Republican candidates.

There are lots of reasons for that, and I'd be happy to go into it in more detail with anyone who would like to spar over it a bit. But for now I'll just note the most important: I believe President Obama has demonstrated a pragmatic approach to governing that seeks incremental change. Meanwhile, it is the leading voices of the right who are increasingly ideological in their politics. It is the right which demands a utopia. To be sure, this utopianism is cloaked in conservative language, but pining for a return to a mythically pure and prosperous past that never was is no less a pipe dream than seeking a perfect future.

My attitude is, let's try to make people's lives a little better. I don't think there's anything unconservative about that sentiment. What gets me into trouble with conservatives is that I don't really care who does it or how, as long as it really is improving lives and strengthening the social fabric. So if it works, whether it is done by church or state is fairly immaterial. But I would argue that when you add any condition onto that -- "if it works and is done by this group or in that way" -- you're moving from a conservative sensibility to an unnecessarily ideological framework.

I hope this was as interesting to read as it was to write!

a lot of christians don't care about poor people

2012-02-12T14:29:00.000-05:00

What I hear from evangelicals a lot is that it is the church's job, not the government's, to care for the poor. I would dispute the either/or proposition contained in that argument (after all, the laws God gave Israel included government mandated redistribution of wealth) but for our purposes, let's accept the premise. It is the church's job, period.

But here's the thing...many of our evangelical churches don't like poor people. We look down on them. We assume irresponsible behavior is the cause of their condition. We stand in judgment over them, determining who is and who is not "deserving" of help. We get excited about political candidates who scapegoat poor people (especially dark skinned poor people) as the cause of many of our problems. Worthy poor people live in places like Bangladesh and Mozambique. Here in America we just have lazy people.

We say it is the church's job to care for the poor, yet attend churches that don't help people pay their rent or buy groceries. It is the church's job and yet the pastoral leadership has not told the business owners in our congregation that the hiring of ex-felons should prioritized. It is the church's job and yet we don't offer affordable child care during the week so single moms can go earn a living. It is the church's job but the kids at the poorly performing public school will have to go somewhere else to find tutoring and mentoring. It is the church's job but you can't expect us to take care of all the medical bills you can't afford. It is the church's job but if you have an addiction you're on your own, especially since you might be dangerous and steal from us.

It is the church's job to care for the poor, but this does not imply that a church, or any of its members, should actually live anywhere near a neighborhood with lots of poor people. It is the church's job, but willingly exposing ourselves to the same challenges the poor face should obviously not be expected. It is the church's job to care for the poor, but the safety and comfort of middle-class church members must, of course, take precedence.

Obviously, since there's so much pain and suffering and unmet need at the present time, despite billions of dollars of government funds, if those governmental efforts were stopped the church would immediately step in and things would get much better.

the way forward for states' rights

2012-02-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

Alicia and I were talking yesterday about our view of "states' rights." Among conservatives there has been a resurgence of interest in recent years about returning to a more states-centric approach to governance and making the tenth amendment a stronger part of our constitutional system. That's all well and good. The problem, as I see it, is the false pretenses under which states' rights proponents usually argue.

The tenor of such advocacy tends to be, "we need to return, go back, restore," and so on. Go back to a time when we were more free. Return to the principles of the founders. Restore the power of the states to do as they see fit and get the federal government out of the way. The implication is that this approach has worked before in securing freedom.

It has not worked. Those who believe it has are, necessarily, thinking from a white supremacist perspective. We tried a weak, unobtrusive federal government combined with strong local governments. That period of our history coincided with slavery, then debt peonage, unequal schooling, de facto police states, unfree labor markets, segregation, and so on. People could not necessarily live where they wished, or pursue the career they desired, or marry the person they loved. All of these things got better as the power of the federal government grew.

I actually think those wishing for more power to be devolved to the states in the future have a good argument to make. I think such a course may be good for the country going forward. But they have to make that case based on what has actually happened. Instead of pretending that it has worked before and we simply need to go back to it, states' rights proponents must explain why American society has changed so much that even though it never worked before, states' rights will work now. Again, I actually am sympathetic to that argument. But I'm not sympathetic to arguments that ignore our history and call evil good.

legacies of vietnam

2012-02-10T16:31:00.000-05:00

I know next to nothing about this topic, so I'm throwing out some questions. If you lived through Vietnam, or have read a lot about it, please give me your insight. Specifically, I'm confused about how it came to be that Republicans are more trusted on foreign policy and Democrats are seen as being soft. My sense is that this is a legacy of Vietnam. Is that correct, or does it also have a lot to do with the apparent impotence of the Carter administration?

If we go with the presumption that the Democrats' lack of credibility on foreign policy is a legacy of Vietnam, it makes sense for the following reason: the Democratic Party, under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, got us embroiled in Vietnam, under false pretenses, and it was a Republican administration that finally got us out. That much makes sense.

But here's where I get confused because my understanding is that the GOP has had the upper hand on issues of war in the past few decades not because Democrats got us into Vietnam, but because they became the party of the anti-war movement. But the anti-war movement was right! It was an immoral colonial war. It was against the will of the people of Vietnam. The U.S. government was lying to us from the start. The United States was responsible for millions of pointless deaths.

So in my mind, the Democrats should have been discredited for getting us into such a mess. But they occupy a weird space as both the party that created the problem and the one that first tried to stop it (the McGovern campaign of 1972). But they seem to have taken more flack for the latter stance, which was correct, than the former, which was horrendously wrong.

I would really like to study this era a lot more and get a better sense of what the fallout has been. How do Americans remember Vietnam now? It seems that the remembrance of it remains quite splintered. Some see it as a war that should have been won, but was undermined by domestic critics. Others see it as a war that should never have been fought. Obviously I'm in the latter camp.

I recently had a conversation with someone who was a teenager during the height of the Vietnam War. This individual spoke in passing of the anti-war demonstrators as if they were the dregs of humanity, the worst of the worst. On the contrary, once we remove the blinders of patriotism and learn a little about Vietnam's history I think we all would hope to have had the courage to burn our draft cards and choose imprisonment over service in such a horrible war.

obama's record, foreign policy

2012-02-09T21:43:00.000-05:00

I'm really looking forward to the general election and, especially, the presidential debates. On foreign policy, what will the GOP nominee (probably Romney) be able to say that will be at all believable to independent voters? Right now, Romney and others have a few attack lines that bring reliable applause from partisan audiences, but they will only make themselves look silly if they persist in these critiques in the general election.

The most persistent charge is that President Obama has "apologized" for America. All the candidates except Ron Paul make this claim. It is particularly galling because it is completely invented. Repeating it over and over for three years doesn't make it true. But I'm missing the point, aren't I? It's not really meant to be a factual claim. It's a statement of how conservative voters feel. They cannot point to anything the President has said or done that can be accurately labeled apologizing, but when they look at him they do not see a proud defender of American greatness. Instead of the moral clarity of a John Wayne or Ronald Reagan, they see a parsing, equivocal college professor.

The related criticism is that President Obama has been weak, has led from behind, and so on. This the Republicans simply lapsed into as a matter of course, since it's what all Democratic presidential candidates have been accused of for several decades. Again, partisan Republicans don't care that it doesn't describe reality, but general election voters will notice.

I think that if people were not so partisan, almost all conservatives would be hearty defenders of Obama's foreign policy, and most liberals would hate it. As it is, the situation is reversed because people are determined to support their team. By any reasonable measure, President Obama has prosecuted the war on terror in a far more focused and aggressive manner than the Bush Administration ever did. He just doesn't talk so loud about it. And incredibly, many conservatives appear to be more concerned with what we call the war than in how it is conducted. Equally bizarre, liberals who railed against every little thing President Bush did can hardly be heard from now that President Obama has blatantly violated the constitution in his anti-terror policies. Partisans of both sides content themselves with symbolism, while caring little about who gets killed overseas in the never-ending attempt to keep Americans 100% safe (it's like we're a set of rare china or something).

In any case, that was a rabbit trail. The point is that the Republican Party does not have good grounds for attacking President Obama on foreign policy precisely because Obama has been so aggressive. Now, it seems to me they should attack him for using drones to kill American citizens without any due process, but it turns out that would not be a political winner. Most Americans have no problem with raining missiles on fellow Americans, as long as it happens in a far off place and the government assures us that the victim was a terrorist.

The problem, then, is that the most cogent critiques of President Obama's foreign policy are, in today's political environment, from what is considered the left. Thus Republicans can't really use those critiques. Republicans will probably try nonetheless to use their traditional strategy for Democratic Presidents, painting him as weak and indecisive. But the average middle of the road voter is just going say, "Huh? What are you talking about? This guy is tough!"

the crises of the 1890s

2012-02-08T12:31:00.000-05:00

The following is a draft I prepared for an upcoming exam. It is basically just a recounting of the arguments of Thomas Schoonover in his book about the 1890s. The broad outlines of his argument makes sense to me but I don't know nearly enough about the era to formulate a strong opinion of my own. It does seem clear to me, though, that in this as in other eras, U.S. policy was far more calculating than our high-minded rhetoric implied. I've long thought, too, that our atrocious and indefensible war in the Philippines should receive more attention, and Schoonover gives it its due.

Thelatter part of the 19^thcentury was a difficult time for the American economy. From therecession of 1873, prices and wages trended downward for the next twodecades, culminating in the severe depression of 1893. This deflationexerted significant pressure on the American capitalist economicmodel and social system. In the depression of the 1890s, unemploymentshot above 20% and strikes and boycotts were rampant. Some politicaland business elites fretted about the problem of "overproduction,"believing that the economy was producing too many good and services.This excess production, many believed, would have to be exported tooverseas markets. Schoonover contends that the problem ofoverproduction was actually an instance of "underconsumption."It was indeed the case that factories could churn out more productsthan ever before, more than American consumers could buy. But thishad more to do with a misallocation of resources than increasedproductivity, Schoonover argues. While America as a whole was one ofthe wealthiest societies in history, many Americans lacked even basicnecessities such as sufficient food and shelter. If wealth wasdistributed more evenly, workers would have the ability to purchasethe products they made and class tensions threatening to rip Americansociety apart would be lessened.

Butrather than seriously altering the distribution of economicresources, American elites sought to "export the social problemand the unemployment," a process Schoonover calls socialimperialism. In an 1898 memo, the State Department noted that "everyyear we shall be confronted with an increasing surplus ofmanufactured goods for sale in foreign markets if American operativesand artisans are to be kept employed the year around. The enlargementof foreign consumption of the products of our mills and workshopshas, therefore, become a serious problem..." Thus as early as1898 the United States government recognized that much was riding onits ability to get foreigners to buy ever-more American products. Sothe United States began to seek more markets in periphery states, onterms favorable to itself though not necessarily beneficial to theperiphery states. By extending its influence into foreign markets,gaining access to cheap raw materials and selling more productsoverseas, the American domestic economy would be strengthened,reducing unemployment and social friction. This necessarily calledfor a more aggressive, outward looking stance in foreign policy.

But to where could the United States export its products and socialproblems? It just so happened that the second crisis of the decadewas occurring in the largest of the periphery states, China. Thegreat European powers and Japan were carving China up into spheres ofinfluence, making a mockery of its sovereignty. By the end of thecentury there was little of strategic or economic value in China thatwas not in some way under the thumb of a foreign power, and soon theexploitation would provoke the Boxer Rebellion and open warfare. TheUnited States, too, participated in the effort to exploit the Chinesemarket, but rather than outright colonization of the huge country,with spheres of interest cut off to American products, the UnitedStates sought an "open door" in which, in Secretary ofState John Hay's words, each country would have "fair field andno favor." Each country, that is, except China. Many Americanofficials had high hopes that Asia, with its huge population, wouldbe a boon to American prosperity. In 1898 the U.S. Ambassador toChina rhapsodized that "The Pacific Ocean is destined to bear onits bosom a larger commerce than the Atlantic." Thus theAmerican domestic crisis was tied to the Chinese crisis. By involvingitself on favorable terms in the latter, the United States couldperhaps solve the former.

It was all well and good to speak of American goods flooding a vastAsian market, bringing prosperity to American workers, but China wasa long way away. Reliable routes of trade had to be established aswell as the means to permanently protect those routes from theinterference of hostile powers. The United States envisioned anetwork of harbors, bases, and coaling stations to tie together itscommerce in the Pacific. As early as 1838 the United States hadidentified three great Pacific harbors, at Pago Pago, Pearl Harbor,and Manila. By the end of the century the United States was inpossession of all three. But the usefulness of these bases and,indeed, the entire Pacific trade, was predicated on the building of aCaribbean canal that would bind east to west, ensuring quick andreliable transit of American commercial and military vessels betweenAtlantic and Pacific.

Thus for American policymakers seeking to relieve domestic turmoilthrough international action, the third crisis, war with Spain in1898, was a godsend. Belying its traditional rhetoric about freedomand high-minded ideals, the United States' conduct of the war wasacquisitive and opportunistic, as it took advantage of the chance togain long-standing objectives such as Manila Harbor and Cuba. As longas Spain remained in possession of Cuba and other Caribbean islands,the United States would not feel secure in its possession of a canal.During the war of 1898 the United States asserted itself as theCaribbean hegemon by seizing Spain's remaining possessions andremoving the last serious obstacle to an American canal. TheCaribbean was now an American lake, clearing the way to turn it intothe pathway to the riches of the Pacific.

Meanwhile American policymakers lost no time in furtherstrengthening the United States' position, at Spain's expense, in thePacific. Though the popular imagination, both then and since, wasmuch absorbed by the action in the Caribbean and the romanticism ofthe Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill, much of the real activitywas occurring elsewhere. The United States seized Manila and Guambefore engaging Spanish forces in the Caribbean. Meanwhileagitation for the annexation of Hawaii finally bore fruit, as someAmericans began to dream of turning the Pacific into “an Americanlake” aided by the possession of the Philippines and Hawaii. Evenanti-imperialists were swept up in the tide, as Senator George Hoarof Massachusetts admitted an exception would have to be made foracquiring Hawaii because it was, of course, necessary “in order tohelp us get our share of China.” Throughout the conflict there wasmuch talk of bearing the white man's burden and spreading freedom,civilization, and Christianity, but the rhetoric did not square withreality. Far from being disinterested or the product of happenstance,U.S. territorial gains during the war of 1898 were highly strategicand correlated to its long-term domestic and Pacific-region economicgoals.

Perhaps nothing better demonstrated the self-interested nature ofAmerican policy than in how it dealt with Cuba and the Philippinesafter acquiring them. Both islands were home to indigenousindependence movements that were ready and eager to govern themselvesas independent countries. But this simply did not fit with Americansocial imperialist goals. The importance U.S. policymakers placed onexpanding Pacific trade was revealed by the extraordinary efforts andresources expended to put down Philippine independence fighters. Tensof thousands of Philippinos were forced into concentration camps andhundreds of thousands were killed. Two years after war with Spain wasover, two-thirds of the U.S. Army was bogged down in the Philippines,at a cost equal to well over 30 billion in today's dollars, at a timewhen such a sum represented a much larger share of GDP than today.Similarly, when the Boxer Rebellion broke out in China, the UnitedStates joined the international coalition of troops that attacked,pillaged, and subdued the Chinese state, forcing it to accept evenmore onerous restrictions on its sovereignty. Clearly, the UnitedStates was now unequivocally committed to the maintenance andexpansion of its foreign trade on terms favorable to itself andunfavorable to periphery states.

Were American statesmen correct in seeing the three crises ofeconomic depression, partitioning of China, and war with Spain asinterconnected? Whether they were or were not, it was to some degreea self-fulfilling prophecy. As economic distress deepened, theconviction grew that the Pacific would provide a safety valve. Butthat implied gaining hegemony in the Caribbean, the gateway to thePacific. That in turn implied conflict with Spain, and when it camein 1898 the United States quickly took action to gain crucialadvantages in all three crises.

In the following decade, American leaders had reason to think theircourse had been a wise one. Pacific and Caribbean trade did indeedgrow, with the value of imports from the Pacific going from sixmillion to forty million in a single year. The larger volume of cheapimports alleviated some of the pressure on average workers bydampening the cost of living. An isthmian canal would finally bebuilt, and it would be an American canal securely under Americancontrol. In the end, the response to the three crises of the 1890sdid much to shape subsequent American policy. As the currentadministration's reorienting toward Asia shows, the idea that thefuture of the American economy is intimately tied to the Pacific isas fresh and vital today as it was at the end of the 19^thcentury.

obama's record, continued

2012-02-07T18:22:00.000-05:00

Most people would probably be surprised to know that we actually have decent ways of measuring how radical a present is compared to past presidents. Political scientists have developed ways of measuring political ideology over time. Suffice it to say that it's rather complicated and people a lot smarter than me spend their lives working on this stuff.

Anyway, what does such data show about President Obama? After all, if he is the radical socialist of the right-wing imagination, we ought to see it in the political science literature. Instead, President Obama's record looks like this:

What this graph shows is that by this measure President Obama is the most moderate Democratic president since World War 2 (presumably since Woodrow Wilson, considering FDR was the only other one). Among political scientists it is common knowledge that the Republican Party has moved dramatically to the right in the past few decades, but the average voter doesn't realize that. Thus the standard for what is considered liberal has moved to the right as well.

odds and ends

2012-02-06T07:00:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while you read something that blows your mind in reminding you how short American history is. Take this story from Politico. It turns out that President John Tyler, our 10th President (1841-1845) has two living grandsons! That's not a typo. Granted, this required both Tyler and his son to father children late in their lives, but it remains no less remarkable. I wonder how many people living today have grandparents from the same era? I suppose demographers could give us a rough estimate. How many elderly black Americans are the grandchildren of slaves? It's fascinating to think about and a reminder that this American experiment really hasn't been going on long at all.

In other news, a few days ago I saw a car with a bumper sticker on it reading "I am John Galt," a reference to the protagonist of Ayn Rand's anti-Christian, pro-selfishness Objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged. The other bumper sticker on the car? "Redeemer Christian Schools." I saw another John Galt bumper sticker on a car in a church parking lot several months ago. Ayn Rand's ideas about society and moral behavior were some of the most repugnant I've ever been exposed to, but they do appeal to our innate selfishness and the pull of American materialism and the American dream. So much so that, I guess, some people try to reconcile them with Christianity.

I have no idea if this has merit, but Francis Fukayama (he of the famous "end of history" thesis) has a really interesting idea about why American government is not more effective:

Conversely, I would argue that the quality of governance in the U.S. tends to be low precisely because of a continuing tradition of Jacksonian populism. Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The U.S. is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently. The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes.

Even if this is true, it seems to me that the fact that democracy came before an elitist bureaucracy brings with it a variety of important advantages of its own.

Last, Jeffrey Goldberg had an excellent and slightly humorous column last week about how the Republican field of candidates really is trafficking in racial dog-whistling to win white conservative voters:

The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. Itwould be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh torun for public office, given his record of fairlystraightforward race-baiting...But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enoughthat Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, atleast during the largely white Republican primaries.

[Harvard Law's Randall] Kennedy, who studies the role of race in nationalelections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measurewhether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: Ifit takes more than two sentences for a critic to explainwhy a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins.Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despitecriticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamppresident” a staple of his stump speeches.

So true. Even most of the people whose prejudices are being appealed to don't realize what's going on!

tea party painter

2012-02-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

I hear his prints are quite popular these days. Doesn't he realize how overwrought this appears? The symbolism is remarkable. The President is not just a normal political opponent with whom he disagrees; he is an anti-American tyrant forging chains around the innocent, good-hearted American people.

Of course, it's tone deaf too. See, we have had presidents who sought to increase the number of Americans in chains. And I can assure you, those Americans were not white, as most are in this picture.

The most popular conservatives continue to claim that any criticism of the President is labeled racism. This is not the case. I regularly read several conservative blogs with which I often agree and I find no racial animus in their strong criticisms of the President. But the most popular conservative voices are not at all like David Frum or Reihan Salam.

The most popular conservatives are not content to disagree with President Obama's policies. They insist on portraying him as unusual, out of the American mainstream, socialist, and so on. The fact that he so clearly isn't any of those things compels those of us who haven't drunk the kool-aid to to search for an explanation for this hysteria. And yes, racism is probably the best explanation. The data, after all, consistently show that Republican voters, as a group, have higher levels of racial prejudice. And the sad fact is that most Republicans who don't share that prejudice are making excuses for their party instead of cleaning it up.

obama's record

2012-02-04T07:00:00.000-05:00

I know it's an article of faith among many Republicans that President Obama doesn't have a record to run on in November. They assume he will run an extremely negative campaign to draw attention from his own dismal performance in office. Unfortunately for the GOP, the President actually has a remarkably impressive record to build a campaign on, if only he and his advisers can begin to defend it boldly.

Start with jobs. From the time the recession began in December 2007 through the month President Bush left office, the economy lost 4.3 million jobs. Keep that in mind. Republicans don't want people to know that over 4 million jobs were lost before Obama even assumed the Presidency. During Obama's first year in office, through January 2010, another 4.3 million jobs were lost. In the two years since, the economy has added private sector jobs every single month, and gained a total of 3.1 million jobs, including 3.4 million private sector jobs (the difference reflects cuts in government jobs). You can see the monthly data here.

So for Obama's entire Presidency, we have a deficit of about 1.2 million jobs. But there are 8 more employment reports between now and the election. If the average of these reports is similar to this month's report, in the month before the election Obama will be able to campaign on a net gain of 800,000 jobs during his first term, including over 5 million new jobs within the last three years.

I think if you had told anyone of either party during the winter of 2008-09 while we were losing 800,000 jobs per month that we would have job gains during this term, they would have been thrilled. Obama will be able to say, without any exaggeration or untruth, that in the past few years we've gone through the worst employment situation since the Great Depression, and that the 5 million new jobs added after his policies were enacted are a strong endorsement for a second term.

What can Romney say in response to that? He will have to hedge and obfuscate and distort. He will continue to claim the President has made things worse, but if jobs continue to grow at this clip the American people are not going to believe him. Nor should they. The dirty little secret that a lot of average voters on both sides of the political spectrum don't want to acknowledge is that the three main recovery policies, all of them unpopular, worked. The bank bailout, begun by Bush and continued by Obama, worked. The auto bailout, begun by Bush and continued by Obama, worked. The stimulus, an entirely democratic project, worked.

We need only look to Europe, which has followed Republican policies of tight money and budget cutting, to see that these three American recovery policies worked. In Europe, unemployment is going up. A second recession is beginning. And their budgets are hardly better off.

Thank God we've had a "reckless, socialist, big-spending, Muslim, liberal, Kenyan, religion-attacking, dependency-creating" president these past few years. If the people complaining had got their way, I'm quite sure many of them would be unemployed. I wish they could live in the world they would unwittingly create, if only for a week or two. Then they might finally give the President some of the credit he deserves.

cause for optimism

2012-02-03T11:34:00.000-05:00

The unemployment report released today shows more robust job growth than we've experienced in quite a while, with 243,000 jobs added and the unemployment rate dropping to 8.3%. With all the macroeconomic talk and political implications for November, it is easy to forget that these reports represent real people. Last month, there were 250,000 more Americans who gained jobs than lost them. I personally know of at least one of those people, and what a difference having a job makes.

But back to the macro: I think we have reason to be quite optimistic about the recovery over the next few years. We're now in the 5th year of recession/crisis/recovery. I think we tend to forget how long this has been going on. When this recession began, I was not married, for example. Kids that were in high school are now getting ready to graduate from college in a few months. It's been a really long time. But by the broadest measures (GDP and employment) the bleeding was already stopped two to three years ago and we've been very slowly recovering since then.

What's encouraging is that the pace of the recovery appears to be picking up even as the sectors of the economy that traditionally lead recoveries remain moribund. Housing and construction usually drive our recoveries, but they both remain mired at unprecedentedly poor levels. But here's the thing: if we're plodding along, slowly adding millions of jobs while housing is such a drag on the economy, what will happen when it finally rebounds?

Before long, perhaps a year or two, we're going to wake up and realize we have a housing shortage. In recent years new housing construction has been at levels not seen since the 1940s and 50s, when the country was half the size it is now. This works for a while because the housing boom produced a glut of houses and, since the bad economy has discouraged household formation, more people live with each other or with their parents.

But eventually, perhaps sooner than we think, as the labor market continues to improve these people are going to want to find their own place. College grads will finally move out of their parents house; couples will finally tie the knot and buy that first house. Thus housing and construction will revive, spurring employment, which will in turn cause more household formation, further stimulating construction, in a virtuous cycle.

Right now it's like we've got one hand tied behind our back and we're still recovering at a decent clip. But sooner or later that other hand will be untied and this recovery will really take off.

the contraception controversy

2012-02-02T21:47:00.000-05:00

Does anyone understand what the big fuss is over the Obama administration's recent decision to require large religious organizations like Catholic hospitals and colleges to include contraceptive coverage in the health care packages they provide their employees?

I understand that a bunch of old men in the church hierarchy are going to be upset. Some of these guys, like the current pope, appear to be much more concerned about maintaining all kinds of unbiblical rules around sex than in preventing the rape of little boys. So you knew they would throw a fit. But I've heard from numerous sources that this is a big deal and it may turn Catholic voters away from the Democratic Party. Some evangelicals are piling on, citing it as the latest evidence of the administration's "war on religion."

I find this quite puzzling. Are there still American Catholics in any significant number who believe and follow the church's teaching on contraception? Are unfounded rumors about abortion coverage getting mixed in to the story to inflame people's opposition? It seems bizarre that there would be such a big backlash over something that almost everyone openly defies the church on anyway. What's the rationale? "I will live in disobedience to the Catholic church on my own--how dare you help me pay for it!"

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something. But wouldn't it be nice if the bishops showed as much energy and outrage over, you know, actual moral evils? Perhaps ones perpetrated by their own institution?

the banality of love

2012-02-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

On Sunday our pastor said something that stuck with me (for three days at least). As Christians we believe in a God who will save us and take us to heaven when we die, but we don't even believe he can change our neighborhood. It seems easier to believe in heaven than in the hope that, say, Chicago will have 100 murders this year instead of the usual 400-500. Isn't that messed up?

Jesus said to pray for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. But as our pastor said, it's a bit disingenuous for us to pray for things we're not willing to do our part to see come about. Recently he and other pastors met to discuss the violence in Akron. He said that he would like to pray for the number of murders this year to be less than 10, but he wasn't sure he was willing to do anything about it. Because that might mean going to the bars on Saturday night, visiting the crack houses, and so on. How easy it is to pray.

As Alicia and I attempt to become more loving people, I'm struck by how boring it is. Everyone but sociopaths can be motivated to love and get all emotional about how they're going to help the world. But then opportunities to actually do stuff come up and it usually feels trivial and really mundane. But if you only show up for the big stuff, you're missing most of the game.

ron paul, extremist

2012-01-31T07:00:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post last week reported that Ron Paul appears to have been more involved in the publication of his racist newsletters than he has let on. It seems that he and his associates thought using explicitly racist language would be a good way to expand the popularity of their libertarian message in the early 90s. The picture that emerges is of Paul as a calculating businessman using racism for material gain.

This is the last straw for me. I like Ron Paul. But it's time to face the fact that my positive response to him is almost entirely emotional rather than being based in facts. Here's what I like about him: he's not a normal politician, he doesn't pander, he's sincere. He wants to end the war on drugs and have a less aggressive foreign policy. Of all the candidates, including Obama, he has talked most openly about the racism in our justice system and the need to reform our drug laws. All of that is so refreshing and so out of the mainstream that it makes me and many others almost ignore everything else. But there's too much to ignore:

The newsletter scandal indicates that, during the 1990s, Paul's small government message was more important to him than basic decency. He has not convincingly denied or explained this. Furthermore, to this day he argues that Lincoln was a bad president who trampled on constitutional rights, and that the Civil War was unnecessary because compensated emancipation would have worked. Apparently he's never read a book about the Civil War. Similarly, he believes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unnecessary, essentially taking the Goldwater position that earned the support of millions of white supremacist Democrats that year. His understanding of such basic moments in American history is completely wrong.

I think what we need to understand about Paul is that everything gets filtered through his libertarian ideology. That's why he can have such ridiculous ideas about American history. Everything simply has to fit in his framework, so he'll change the facts to suit him. We love him for his sincerity, but what good is it to be sincerely wrong?

And then there's the economics. I would be fascinated to hear Ron Paul's explanation of, say, the depression of the 1890s. At a time when there was no federal reserve, no government entity setting interest rates, no national paper currency, no welfare state, why did unemployment go above 20%? Why were the two decades between 1873 and 1893 so disastrous? Why did prices and wages trend downward for 20 years? If there's one thing economists have a consensus on, it's that deflation is a really horrible thing. We endured it for decades before the Federal Reserve, but not since. Why have our economic downturns been less severe since the establishment of the modern welfare state? Why has the business cycle been less volatile and economic hardship been reduced?

I have not heard Ron Paul give an explanation for these things. If his views on the civil war and civil rights are any indication, I doubt he has a coherent one. He promises to cut spending and taxes more dramatically than any other candidate. People like the sound of that. But Paul proposes to do it so quickly that it would produce an economic depression much deeper than anything we've experienced in our lifetimes. I don't think any economists would argue with that. If that's not problematic enough, I think that even conservatives would soon find that they appreciate basic welfare supports like medicare and social security. All of these young people cheering Paul on might change their minds when their parents medical bills start falling to them instead of medicare.

Anyway, this isn't some kind of hit piece on Ron Paul. I genuinely like the guy. But at a certain point I have to let my reason assert itself. He's an extremist, and most of his policy proposals are absurd. I can't let his good points outweigh that basic fact.