After the Future

CPAC

Should the stuff these people are saying just be just laughed off or should it be worrying? I'm not sure. Some describe it as the Conservative movement's implosion, but I'm not so sure of that. If we were living in a time of relative economic stability, I'd be less bothered by CPAC antics.

As long as Obama's popularity remains high, it poses no threat, and If Obama is perceived by most Americans to be succeeding, the kind of craziness we've witnessed  this week will be pushed to the periphery.  But it's clear these people want Obama to fail, that they believe his success will be the destruction of America as they conceive of it, and they will do everything they can to make him fail.  And it's clear to me that if Obama does fail, the kind of turmoil such a failure will thrust the country into will make the CPAC message very attractive to ill-informed and desperate Americans. This kind of insanity in one form or another might very well be our future.

P.S. I know this Hannity poll has gotten a lot of exposure, but I just want to post it here for the record so I can find it easily.  But the very fact that a mainstream media personality can put something like this up tells us how surreal things have become.

But one thing I hope Republican moderates who might occasionally read this blog can agree with me about now is that this kind of right wing nonsense cannot be taken seriously on it merits. There is no merit in it.  It is a manifestation of a  social-psychological disease.  It has more in common with substance abuse and joining a religious cult than it has with people with whom one has honest political difference of opinion. Fully  a third of the country is in this state of collective insanity to some degree, and if the economy continues to go south and Obama is blamed for it, there will be a lot more swelling their ranks.

Relative calm and sanity in the country during the last forty years has correlated with economic stability.  Once that factor is removed, anything goes.

True Believers (Updated)

Mark Kleiman:

Brooks fears that Barack Obama's ambition is leading him into what Oakeshott called "rationalism in politics."

But thinking of it that way just shows how hopelessly off-base Brooks's criticism is. Obama isn't working out the details of some grand vision; he is doing what Machiavelli called "temporizing with accidents." He has specifically referred to FDR's principle of experimentation: try it, see if it works, and if it doesn't work then try something else.

When Oakeshott criticized rationalism, he wasn't advocating irrationalism, but instead a kind of empiricism, what he called "feeling for the balance of the thing." His "rationalists" - he was primarily thinking of Fabian socialists - imagine that they know a method of analysis that allows them to design major social changes in detail and impose them without much reference to facts on the ground or the opinions of others. Their "rationalism" is in fact dogmatism. That's the hubris against which Oakeshott warns. Could anything possibly be further from the Obama approach?

Neocons are rationalists in politics. Libertarians and the anti-tax crowd are rationalists in politics. Radical social conservatives such as Sarah Palin and Pope Benedict are rationalists in politics. Drug warriors and "anti-prohibitionists" are rationalists in politics.

Rationalists in this sense are what I have elsewhere described as archetypal Jacobins. (See here and here.) They are true believers who have a mental template that defines how the world ought to be, and they are rigid in their insistence that the world conform to their ideal imagination of it. And if it does not conform as it is wont not to do, they are often undertake ruthless crusades to force it to conform.   It's what Mao had in common with the Spanish Inquisition; it's what the historical Jacobins in late 18th Century France had in common with the witch-burning Puritans in late 17th Century New England. It's what the Leninists of the teens and twenties have in common with the Taliban.

It's not that such true believers simply have an opinion with which one can agree or disagree. They are not interested in discussion because they already know the truth, and for them it's only a question whether you will be converted to it or not.  If not they will, at best, have nothing to do with you, at worst they will have you liquidated because you are either damned or anti-revolutionary depending on the particulars. Such true believers are burdened with a form of collective mental illness. They are dangerous, and they are to be zealously resisted, and they must be prevented from assuming positions of political power.

I'm not going to pile on regarding Jindal's odd response speech Tuesday night. While he exhibits many of the characteristics of the true believer, I don't think he is one.  Neither is a guy like John McCain. But it doesn't matter who they are individually because their party's power base is dominated by true believers, so even if they are not, their future in the party depends on accommodating them, because they will not accommodate non-believers. True believers don't accommodate.

Obama's Address to Congress

First thoughts:  I listened from beginning to end, which I can't ever recall doing when listening to a president address congress--not Clinton, not Bush I, not Reagan. I didn't find my self cringing or rolling my eyes after listening to the expected cheesy, patently false formulaic, political bloviation.  Even if you disagree with everything he said, it was a non-b.s. political speech. He treated his audience as adults with common sense, not as children who must trust that Daddy knows best.

That being said, while I want to believe that his confidence and can-do spirit is well-founded--I would have been disappointed if he gave us anything less--I really don't believe it. I see him making the most credible case for his activist program that he could possibly make--and I hope he succeeds and that he delivers the results he's hoping for--but my gut tells me that it's not happening. We're in for some very rough weather, but I wouldn't want anyone else at the helm.

P.S. I forgot that I did roll my eyes when he said that America invented the automobile--that surprised me. I'm not saying that Obama wasn't being political--he was, but in a refreshing way. He was trying to push buttons in the American psyche that seek to unite us and galvanize us for meeting some tough times to come.

Culture vs. Politics

Noah Millman has an interesting contribution to the ongoing debate begun by Damon Linker at TNR which was taken up by Deneen and Larison. (All the appropriate links to earlier posts on this question can be found on the posts I link to above.) Linker, I think, misjudges Larison and Deneen, but not Millman insofar as Millman thinks it's impossible to define where cultural issues end and political issues begin.  I address this question in my post from a couple of years ago, "Religion and Politics." 

Millman argues from a premise that must be rejected.  Politics in a pluralistic society has nothing to do with defining the good life.  It has instead to do with defining rules for adjudicating between competing interests in a pluralistic society. Those rules in order to be fair have to assume an attitude of neutrality toward all metaphysics and moral systems. Politics must strive to operate in a framework that respects different values complexes and metaphysical worldviews, but is itself organized around valuing the promotion of good citizenship which has mainly to do with promoting and protecting citizen rights. Here's the nub of his argument:

To start off: I understand Linker’s argument well enough, and why it is appealing to be able to “bracket” questions about “the good life” and engage in politics only on the level of “mere life.” I understand why it’s appealing – I just don’t agree that it’s possible.

It’s not possible because there is no agreed upon boundary between “mere life” and “good life” questions; because there are liberal virtues the lack of which among the citizenry will make it impossible to sustain a liberal polity; and because propagating those virtues through education necessarily involves the state in conflict with those citizens who radically dissent from liberal metaphysics.

Whether or not it's possible to define such boundaries is irrelvant because questions of the good life/mere life are not relevant to politics in the political sphere in pluralistic society. If you are going to embrace pluralism--and we don't really have a sane choice to do otherwise--then you have to develop a values neutral political sphere that treats the pluralism of groups with their metaphysics and moral vision equally. The state is only concerned that these groups and the individuals in them treat one another with a basic level tolerance and respect.

Concerns about the good life are for the cultural sphere alone, and the state has only the responsibility to see that individuals or groups are not impeded by other groups or the state in defining what the good life means in the plurality of ways people seek to define it.  The state has no stake in traditional definitions, but it respects traditional definitions. The only values that are appropriate to the state are those that promote good citizenship, which comprise in the main respect for the rule of law, tolerance of the Other, and respect for the rights of other citizens as constitutionally defined.

In other words, in order to be deemed a good citizen, one has to accept that he lives in a culturally pluralist society, and that nobody imposes his cultural values on the other in the political sphere. That's the only values principle that the state should care about. Individuals can persuade and proselytyze their metaphysics or moral vision in the cultural sphere, but must understand that they cannot legislate their metaphysics or their moral ideas about the good life. Ethics in the political sphere is solely determined by neutral human rights or citizen rights framework.  The only ethical values the state cares about are those that protect rights and promote the respect for the rights of others to define the good life for themselves.

Now Millman would object:

Movie Treatment: The Second Civil War (Updated)

Treatment for a first episode in bad made-for-TV miniseries:

It's 2011. As credits roll in the opening, scenes of lines at soup kitchens, tent cities, a radio newcast voiceover describes a food riot in Miami, survivalists in a firefight with mobile marauders in the Northwest, another voiceover editorializes about the failure of the Obama administration's economic policy.

Opening Scene: Pakistan, room in a walled compound in middle of bustling city. Bin Laden is talking to his closest advisors: he exults in having succeeded  beyond his wildest dreams. He talks about his attack on 9/11 as the match that set the played-out American system ablaze like a California forest fire in August. He sees now that 9/11 gave the the corrupt infidels running the American system all the slack they needed to rob the country blind and to run the country into the ground. This would reveal to the world America's true face. This is what he hoped for, but he admits to those he's speaking to, he could not have imagined that it would be so easy.

Second Scene: Oklahoma City--A heavily armed militia group with about 168 members has just invaded and taken over the rebuilt Federal Building. They've evacuated all the workers, and now the building is surrounded by FBI attempting to negotiate their surrender. Their leader gives an interview to Fox News in which he gives a long speech about how Obama is a communist who seeks to destroy everything that is pure and true about America. Fox News analysts debate the legitimacy of his ideas. Limbaugh on his show condemns the takeover, but makes it clear that these are misguided patriots who are speaking a truth America doesn't want to hear. 

The militia men have set explosives all around the building, so that if any SWAT Team attacks, it will trigger the destruction of the building. They want the building to be blown up, they want to die, and they want the symbolism to be clear to everyone--the Federal Government is the enemy. They want their martyrdom to heighten the contradictions, as the leftists used to say, they want to start a nationwide insurrection that will provoke the government to declare martial law, suspend habeas corpus, and posse comitatus. They want this to be the Fort Sumter of the Second American Civil War.

Third Scene: White House Situation room--Obama and  advisors debating.  Obama makes it clear that he doesn't want these people to be martyred.  Everything must be done to capture them alive and to prevent the building from being blown up, even if it means waiting several weeks. 

Fourth Scene: A rogue national guard unit led by Lt. Gen. Terry Doykin from a nearby military base in collusion with the the militia rolls into the city, forcibly pushes aside the FBI, and attacks the building causing it to disappear in a fireball. The TV footage shows the American military attacking and causing the conflagration, right-wing radio erupts blaming the Obama administration for ordering this attack. Republican senators denounce the rash acts of a bloodthirsty president who seeks to violently eliminate his political enemies. 

Fifth Scene: Quick Cuts to scenes around in the south and mountain west: In a coordinated actions, militia and rogue national guard units move in and take over government buildings that symbolize federal power.

Jonah Goldberg on The Daily Show claims he predicted this kind of fascistic behavior in his 2008 book. Andrew Sullivan on the Maher show demands the Obama government restore order.  Greenwald on the Maddow show has a brain freeze and is speechless. Olbermann gives an incoherent 20-minute special comment that nobody can understand.

Sixth Scene: Situation Room-- Some members screaming for the imposition of martial law. Others argue against. Obama listens. Joint Chiefs head cannot say who in Northcom is loyal and who sympathizes with the militias. White House Counsel Craig argues that the executive must use his powers to preserve the government. Secy. Clinton notes the irony that Obama might be forced by the vast right-wing conspiracy to use all the  tools created by the Bush administration to become the autocrat the left feared would emerge from the right. 

To be continued--end of miniseries episode 1.

Unlike the writers at "Lost", I haven't figured out how this series is going to end.  I'll leave it to a real screenwriter to finish the job.

****

UPDATE:  I see that Greenwald has a post up by coincidence today talking about militias and civil war.  Must be something in the water.  I wasn't aware of the Glenn Beck nonsense earlier this week until reading Greenwald's blog Sunday afternoon.

How seriously should we take these people?  I'm not sure, but I think we cannot just shrug them off as fringe cranks. Greenwald gets it right. The mindset that has these people in its grip has been around since forever, and Hofstadter talked about them 45 years ago in his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics. The difference now is that even though they are still a minority, they are well funded, well organized, and they have a media megaphone they didn't have fifty years ago.

I seriously doubt that a scenario like the one I depicted above will ever happen, but we are foolish to underestimate the threat these true believers pose, especially in an economically stressed environment. Do they have grievances that can be sanely adjudicated?  I don't know how they can be. They are like a Taliban-like religious cult that wants not just to be left alone, but to dominate in the American political sphere.

Executive Suite (Updated)

God forbid that Obama should undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency. From Greenwald today regarding Charlie Savage's NYT article about Obama's continuing Bush ideas about executive privilege:

Concerning the pending dispute over Bush's wildly broad assertions of executive privilege in order to prevent his aides (such as Karl Rove) from having to disclose information to Congress, Savage quotes Obama's White House counsel Greg Craig as follows:

Addressing the executive-privilege dispute, Mr. Craig said: "The president is very sympathetic to those who want to find out what happened. But he is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency. So for that reason, he is urging both sides of this to settle."

That may be the most revealing quote of the article.  If--as virtually all Bush critics agree--the Bush presidency ushered in a massive and dangerous expansion of executive power, isn't it necessary, by definition, to scale back some of those powers-- i.e., to "undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency"--if those abuses are to be reversed?  The cynical view has long been that Obama will not, on his own, meaningfully uproot Bush's executive power expansions because political officials do not get into office and then start voluntarily giving up their own power.  Craig's statement constitutes a virtual affirmation of the cynic's view of Obama's intentions.

Not Good.  We'll see how this plays out--we should expect his lawyers think in the narrowly expedient, visionless, turf-conscious way that bureuacrats think, but we need to hear it from Obama before getting really bent out of shape on this.  This better be an issue a reporter confronts him about in his next presser. The worst-case scenario for America is that the Bush authoritarian infrastructure, aka
"executive privilege," remain intact long enough for the Republicans to get back into power again. Obama may or not abuse his executive powers, but we can be sure someone in the future will.

UPDATE: Sullivan gets it:

It may be that there are just unavoidable costs to Bush's legacy, and revealing the full extent of those crimes could undermine security or alliances in ways no government responsible for security in a flawed and fallen world can allow. At the same time, there's a very thin line between having no choice but to inherit this stinking pile and retroactively becoming complicit in it. I worry increasingly about the latter.

There are always good reasons for doing the wrong thing.  If you are president of the United States, the advocates for doing the wrong thing are legion, and their arguments hard to resist especially when only three weeks into the job.

Right America: Feeling Wronged

I watched Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary last night. Pelosi wants to show that there are two Americas which are incapable of understanding one another.  Her film is an attempt from the Liberal side to at least listen sympathetically to what the conservative side has to say, even if some rapprochement is at the end of the day impossible. In a Salon interview she had this to say about her intentions in making the film:

But I'm trying to focus on the friends that I made in the red states instead of focusing on all the unchristian experiences that I had while traveling across America. It's easy to go out and make enemies. I think all the cable news programs go with the intention of stirring the pot. I was really genuinely trying to get to know some of the Republican base.

Thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people showed up to see the McCain-Palin ticket. Maybe a dozen people humiliated me -- you know, embarrassed me and made me feel really unwanted. I don't want to paint the whole lot of the Republican base as mean-spirited and cruel and unfriendly. To me it's more interesting to focus on the real Christian conservatives who didn't agree with anything I had to say but invited me over for dinner so that we could talk about it.

I would have liked to have seen whether those dinner conversations were a real two-way dialogue. Because despite her intentions, I don't know that her film helps to build understanding, even a little bit. Obama's approval rating is in the 70 percent range at the moment. Many of these approvers are among the 58 million who didn't vote for Obama. Pelosi, however, interviews the people from the thirty percent who cannot and likely will not ever approve of him. For some it's about race, but for most it's about his being a heretic. 

If there were any sane, thoughtful people capable of saying anything but formulaic GOP talking points at these rallies, she didn't find them (except one guy who apologized for the bad behavior of his rally mates). Or if she did find any, she didn't put them in her film. The people she interviews, even those that seem like normal, decent people, have crazy, ungrounded ideas. They feel misunderstood and that no one listens to them, but they are not interested in listening to the arguments of those who oppose them. In their minds, anybody who supports Obama is an idiot who doesn't fully appreciate that he will destroy the real America they alone love. That's the message they feel the media doesn't give equal time to. They feel disrespected, but they demand respect for attitudes that are extraordinarily difficult for even the most generous person who disagrees with them to respect.

Web of Interest

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."-- Henry Ford

Simon Johnson has been getting a lot of exposure lately. In addition to the TPM blog posts from which I quote in and Update to my last post, he was also interviewed on TPM  and then last night on Moyers.

The Moyers interview is particularly strong in confirming my pessimism about the the bank bailout and the stimulus plan:

BILL MOYERS: Both the "Wall Street Journal" and "The New York Times" reported this week that Obama's top two political aides, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, have pushed for tougher action against the banks. But they didn't prevail. Obama apparently sided with Geithner and the Treasury Department in using a velvet glove.

SIMON JOHNSON: What I read from that is that there is an unnecessary and excessive deference to the experts, or the supposed experts.

And I think the view that a lot of people have in Washington - I live in Washington, I follow this very closely - the view is that you need to rely on the technocrats. And the technocrats are saying, "This is the way to go, and you mustn't be too tough on because banks, because that will have adverse consequences for credits, and for the economy, and for unemployment," and so on and so forth. Those technocrats, if that's what they're saying, are wrong. That is not the right way to deal with this crisis.

There are many fine professionals at Treasury with great experience, who have spent their lives working on important issues related to the United States. What we face right now is not a typical U.S. issue. We face a crisis, and the president said this on Monday night, the president said, President Obama said, "We've never seen anything like this since the Great Depression."

Therefore, nobody working now, you know, has any firsthand experience. And he also said, "We may face what we call a lost decade." We've never seen that anywhere other than Japan in the 1990s, right?

And something for Treasury officials to really understand, and to really understand the alternatives - they're not, I mean, with all due respect to them, they're not the ultimate authority. I don't think they're the right people.

The correct people you should be asking this question to are people at the IMF. And I can tell you what they're saying is the policy that we seem to be perusing, of being nice to the banks, is a mistake. The powerful people are the insiders. They're the CEOs of these banks. They're the people who run these banks. They're the people who pay themselves the massive bonuses at the end of the last year. Now, those bonuses are not the essence of the problem, but they are a symptom of an arrogance, and a feeling of invincibility, that tells you a lot about the culture of those organizations, and the attitudes of the people who lead them.

BILL MOYERS: Geithner has hired as his chief-of-staff, the lobbyist from Goldman Sachs. The new deputy secretary of state was, until last year, a CEO of Citigroup. Another CFO from Citigroup is now assistant to the president, and deputy national security advisor for International Economic Affairs. And one of his deputies also came from Citigroup. One new member of the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board comes from UBS, which is being investigated for helping rich clients evade taxes.

You're probably too young to remember that old song, "Sounds like the Mack the Knife is back in town." I mean, is that what you're talking about with this web of relationships?

SIMON JOHNSON: Absolutely. I don't think you have enough time on your show to go through the full list of people and all the positions they've taken. I'm sure these are good people. Don't get me wrong. These are fine upstanding citizens who have a certain perspective, and a certain kind of interest, and they see the world a certain way.

And it's exactly a web of interest, I think, is what you said. And that's exactly the right way to think about it. That web of interest is not my interest, or your interest, or the interest of the taxpayer. It's the interest, first and foremost, of the financial industry in this country.

BILL MOYERS: Do you think that Obama understands how these guys play the game? Let me play you the recording of a conference call "Huffington Post" released this week. One of the top officials of Morgan Stanley is speaking to his colleagues. Here it is.

JAMES GORMAN: I'm going to turn to a topic that I suspect is near and dear to everybody's hearts, which is retention. There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus, it is not a bonus it is an award. The award will be based on '08 full year production. Clearly it would have been cheaper to do it off '09 but we think it's the right thing to do and we've made that decision.

SIMON JOHNSON: What he's basically saying is business as usual. Go about your daily lives. Get the bonuses. Re-brand them as awards. But it really shows you the arrogance, and I think these people think that they've won. They think it's over. They think it's won. They think that we're going to pay out ten or 20 percent of GDP to basically make them whole. It's astonishing.

BILL MOYERS: Why wouldn't they believe that? I mean, when I watched the eight CEOs testify before Congress at the House Financial Services Committee earlier this week, I had just finished reading a report that almost every member of that Committee had received contributions from those banks last year. I mean in a way that's like paying the cop on the beat not to arrest you, right?

SIMON JOHNSON: I called up one of my friends on Capitol Hill after that testimony, and that session. I said, "What happened? This was your moment. Why did they pull their punches like that?" And my friend said, "They, the Committee members, know the bankers too well."

Geithner and his cronies are not going to fix the problem.They are too deeply soaked in a mentality that prevents them from seeing possibilities outside of the web of interest that structures the world in which they have built their careers and their reputation for success. They are not going to operate outside the world in which they feel comfortable.  Even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and ascribe to them the best motivations, the real solution is beyond their imaginations and capabilities. 

The most positive spin I can put on this is the one I put on it in my last post--it's part of the change curve. It's just part of the typical pattern in which things have to get worse before they get better. Even if he wants to do something radically different, it's politically impossible for Obama to do anything until the oligarchs are proved decisively wrong. You and I could argue that they have been proved wrong because they created the mess to begin with, but that's not how it works. If Joe Gibbs wants to coach the Washington Redskins, you give him the job because of his trackrecord and reputation.  You don't fire him until it's proved that the game has passed him by.

I don't expect you'll see Johnson on CNN or the network news shows (but maybe on MSNBC ), but it's encouraging to know that his critique is out there on the mainstream blogs and on shows like Moyers.

What's Going On? (Updated)

Michael Cohen at TPM Cafe:

Republicans seem to be basing their political aspirations on the hope that the stimulus package fails and the economy worsens. But there is an obvious flip side: what if it works? What if widespread deficit spending is seen as the solution to America's economic woes? Not only will Obama have won a short-term policy battle, he may win the political war as well.

Sixteen years ago, a young Democratic President with control of both houses of Congress, proposed a stimulus package of a mere $19 billion - and was stymied by intractable GOP opposition. Today, a new Democrat President, with the support of a mere three Republicans, is about to pass an $820 billion stimulus plan that represents the most radical transformation of government in 30 years, potentially even 75. Times have most certainly changed. It's about time both left and right woke up to this new political reality.

Two things:  First, yes we are in a completely different reality economically and poltically.  Second, that's why this stimulus bill probably isn't going to work.  Does anybody deep down believe that this stimulus package will?  Does anybody believe that we have people in place who understand this new reality and know what they are doing? I don't because nobody understands it. My sense is that if it does work, it will be pure dumb luck.

I think this stimulus bill or something like it had to be passed, but it's just the first step in learning what isn't going to work. I'm glad that Obama is at the helm, because I suspect among all major political figures on the scene, he is the one who has the intelligence and flexibility of mind to learn from mistakes and to adapt, to recognize what doesn't work and to move on.

For better or for worse, we're going into uncharted territory and we will be gradually learning that what may have worked in the past no longer works now. This stimulus package is an attempt to try something that worked in the old reality for want of knowing what to do in the new. So would it be better to do nothing? I hear the arguments of those who think that all we're doing is postponing the pain and that it would be better to bite the bullet,  let the whole thing collapse and start over. But that isn't going to happen; it's politically impossible to do nothing, so better to have have an experimental attitude rather than a rigid orthodox one. Passivity is the enemy in times like these; we have to be mentally active, alert, open to new possibilities, willing to find new ways to do things.  And the idea that innovation and effective solutions will come from the private sector is nonsense so long as that sector is dominated by the John Thains of the world.

The thought of a country-club fossil like John McCain as president now just sends shivers down my spine. Apart from his world-historical cluelessness, had he won, the John Thains of the world would be in control of both the private and public sectors. You could argue that the Geithners and Summers aren't much different, but the political reality is that Obama has to start with the establishment types until they are proven wrong, and then he'll have the freedom to move forward with people who are savvier about the new reality. I think he is capable of firing these guys and moving on, but we'll see. It's not going to be pretty in the short run, but that's just the way it is.

UPDATE: Simon Johnson, also at TPM Cafe, talks about the kind of thing that probably needs to be done, but won't be done until banking establishment types like Geithner are proved wrong:

What they [IMF personnel] say is this. The right thing to do is reboot the financial system. Find out immediately which banks are insolvent, using market prices. Allow private owners to fully recapitalize, if they can. Have the FDIC take over all banks that cannot raise enough private capital. Try to re-privatize those banks quickly, while making sure the taxpayer has strong partcipation in the upside. The difficulty with this approach is not, in the US or elsewhere, anything technical - it is really quite straightforward. The problem here and everywhere else that has faced a serious financial crisis is: the power of the banking lobby.

If the IMF experts are right and Treasury is wrong, does that help resolve the dilemma?

But who knows if that would work? We're all flying by the seat of our pants.

Quote of the Day: Douthat

Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses. But what Nelson, Collins, Specter and Co. have done isn't a new kind of politics. It's the definition of politics as usual. And in this particular case, there's a reasonable argument that it's actively pernicious - that if you can't shrink the stimulus package much more substantially than the centrists have done, you shouldn't shrink it at all. There's a case to be made for a stimulus that's radically different than the one we have now; there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we're getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version: They've done absolutely nothing to widen the terms of debate about what should go into the bill, and they've shaved off just enough money to reduce its effectiveness if Paul Krugman is right - but not nearly enough to make it fiscally prudent if the stimulus skeptics are right. 

This means that if the damn thing doesn't work, we won't even know whom to blame. But it wouldn't be crazy to start by blaming the centrists. Read more.

Lagaan & Game Theory

I've given up on the idea that anybody really knows what they're doing regarding this economic crisis, so for me figuring out the best course to take is a question of gaming the possibilities. I see Obama as in a similar position to Bhuvan, the hero of the terrific Bollywood film Lagaan--it's among other things IMO one of the greatest sports movies of all time, even though it's about Cricket in 19th-century British-occupied India. Bhuvan is a young village leader who commits his village to a high-risk wager on a cricket match. He must pit his village beginners against the crack players from the local occupying British regiment. The stakes: The Brits have just doubled the tax, or lagaan, on the villagers, who can barely pay the existing tax. The Brits offer the villagers the possibility of paying no taxes for three years if the villagers win, but if they lose, they will have to pay triple tax.

So Bhuvan accepts the wager on behalf of the villagers who freak out at the prospect of paying triple tax, as seems pretty likely--none of the villagers has the slightest idea how the game is played. But Bhuvan seems to be an instinctive game theorist. The country is in drought, and the villagers can't pay the already onerous tax imposed by the Brits, much less the new double tax, so what difference does it make if they triple it? They can't pay the double tax, so neither can they pay the triple tax, so it's disaster either way. Better to take the wager, for at least there's some upside, even if it's low percentage. To do nothing guarantees disaster; to accept the wager is to choose at least a small possibility of a positive outcome.

So the analogy here is obvious. Standing pat regarding spending, as GOP ideology requires, is the same as the villagers just accepting the disastrous imposition of the the double tax. Going ahead with the spending bill is like Bhuvan's wager. Let's assume that spending unimaginable sums of money in an attempt to pull us out of this nose dive has a low-percentage chance of success--at least it will buy us some bridges and schools. So if both no-spending or spending strategies fail, at least with the spending strategy we add needed assets to the commonweal and put some people to work, even if for only a couple of years.  So that in itself is a positive outcome. If we collapse, the world comes with us, and we are in a new game altogether.

But then it just might work--crazy spending could very well be the thing that pulls us out of the nose dive. To me investing a lot of money in the country's infrastructure seems to be the only smart strategy. The crisis calls for bold action, not GOP ideological government passivity. And besides, the idea that anything Republicans say should be taken seriously is absurd. They have zero credibility, and would be afforded none if it were not for the conventions and biases of the establishment media. 

Live and Learn (Updated)

E.J. Dionne:

For most of the debate, Obama has cast himself as a benevolent referee overseeing a sprawling and untidy legislative process to which he would eventually bring order. He urged Democrats to knock out small spending measures that had caused public relations problems while doing little to defend the overall package or to reply to its Republican critics.

In the meantime, those critics were relentless, often casting logic aside to reframe the debate from a practical concern over how to rescue the economy to an ideological dispute about government spending.

I think Obama's experiencing now what college quarterbacks often say about the experience of making the adjustment to the NFL: "The game is played a lot faster up here."  There are a lot of Heisman trophy winners who never made the adjustment. Will Obama be like one of them? Or will he make the adjustment and get into that zone in which the game seems as if it's happening in slow motion?

Obama's had a bad week because he hasn't made the adjustment yet. It looks as though he's reacting rather than commanding, running around frantically trying to fix a hundred things at the same time. For what it's worth, I don't think Hillary would have done any better. I don't think anybody is ready on Day One for a job like this. It just takes time to get into that zone, no matter what one's previous experience or raw political talent. In the old days, a new president was given a grace period, but that's no longer the case--at least not when Republicans are in the opposition. This has been an ugly week he and the rest of us just have to get through, but I believe in his talent and that he'll be fine. He's a big-time player, and he'll find his game.

Daschle Goodbye

I think we dodged a bullet.  The tax stuff is just the tip of the iceberg--we don't want this guy any where near efforts to solve the healthcare problem.

For serious consideration as a replacement: Dr. Howard Dean.  He is the anti-Daschle.  The Beltway establishment won't like him, but he's proved that he can make things happen without its support. I trust the guy's instincts.

Doubt & Belief

Douthat puts it nicely in a post last week:

As you might expect, I see the genesis of religion rather differently: An intuitive belief in some sort of presiding Agent seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with, yes, the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions that seem to Richard Dawkins and company like so much teapot-worship. The story of our civilization, in particular, is a story in which an extremely large circle of non-insane human beings have perceived themselves to be experiencing an interaction with a being who seems recognizable as the Judeo-Christian God (here I do feel comfortable using the term), rather than merely being taught about Him in Sunday School. I am unaware of anything similar holding true for orbiting pots or flying noodle beasts. And without the persistence of this perceived interaction (and beneath it, the intuitive belief in some kind of God), it's difficult to imagine religious belief playing anything like the role it does in human affairs, no matter how many ancient scriptures there were propping the whole thing up.

This is not to say that humanity's religious experiences and intuitions are anything like a dispositive argument for the existence of God. Certainly, there are all sorts of interesting efforts to explain them without recourse to the hypothesis that they correspond to anything real, and all kinds of reasons to choose atheism over faith. But it is one thing to disbelieve in God; it is quite another to never feel a twinge of doubt about one's own disbelief. And just as the Christian who has never entertained doubts about his faith probably hasn't thought hard enough about the matter, the atheist who perceives the Christian God and the flying spaghetti monster as equally ridiculous hypotheses really needs to get out more often.

Belief is rooted in a fundamental interpretation of one's experience.  There is no proving one's interpretation; there is only the attempt to express it honestly and with as much verbal agility as one can muster to represent the unrepresentable. We all of us live knowing that whatever we believe true is a provisional interpretation of our experience that is open to revision. Doubt is an essential x-factor in the ongoing struggle to deepen what we believe and is an essential challenge to our conscience to make this representation in good faith.

But if anyone thinks that his rejection of the naive faith of his childhood is the only necessary step, he is stuck at the beginning of a journey thinking he has come to its end.  Anyone who cannot admit of doubt, whether he is in a believing or unbelieving phase of this ongoing struggle, cannot be taken seriously. Such people are as frightened of the basic open-endedness of this journey to the depths of things as the fundamentalists and dogmatists are. The measure of a life lived in faith is not the degree of certainty professed, but the level of depth attained, and the attainment of any significant depth is an impossibility without doubt.