November 30, 2006
Misusing History at Slate.com Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:20 PM EST With respect to historical analogies, strange doings over at Slate.com: On Tuesday, Diane McWhorter published a piece sneering at the tendency to avoid comparing the Bush administration to the Nazis. She wonders why “nobody seems eager to delve too deeply into what exactly it was about George W. Bush that the voters so roundly rejected . . . polite discussion of that question does not contain any derivative of the words fascism, propaganda, or dictatorship. God forbid Nazi or Hitler.” Early on, Ms. McWhorter points out that the Bush administration, like the Nazis, engages in propaganda. I do not think this successfully isolates the more distinctive qualities of National Socialism. Ms. McWhorter handsomely acknowledges that the Bush people have avoided exterminating the Jews, but insists that this does not get them off the hook. She concludes by assuming the point at issue: The United States is like Nazi Germany because ordinary Americans went along with Bush for a number of years. Before that dazzling display of circular reasoning, she makes a number of other comparisons, and one core of her argument focuses on the brief threat to change the Senate’s rules on the filibuster, which, had it happened, “struck me as a functional analog of the Enabling Act of 1933, which consolidated the German government under Chancellor Hitler and effectively dissolved the Reichstag as a parliamentary body.” For this analogy to hold, you have to assume, at a minimum, that in the event the Republicans had changed the filibuster rules on confirming Federal judges, there would never again have been an election in the United States. And to assume this, you have to be an idiot. An idiot comparing Bush to Hitler is not news. An idiot making this comparison after the opposition wins a national election isn’t news, but it is peculiar. A respectable Internet news and comment outlet publishing a piece elaborating this grotesque analogy, and doing it with stunning ineptitude, may verge on news. Editors at mainstream outlets serve as gatekeepers and tend to exclude at least some sorts of vicious nonsense; descend to a certain level, and you usually become marginalized as a crank or a clown. When a certain sort of vicious nonsense makes it way past the gatekeepers, something may be happening; when previously acceptable if very nasty voices are pushed out of the mainstream, something else is happening. Ann Coulter, for example, pretty swiftly devolved into a clown. Is McWhorter the left’s Ann Coulter? I don’t think so. Slate wouldn’t publish Ann Coulter.
November 30, 2006
Norman Rockwell and the Explosion of Wealth II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST I share John Steele Gordon’s amazement at the story behind Norman Rockwell’s famous painting Breaking Home Ties. A year or so ago my wife and I took a trip to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for a dose of autumnal leaf-peeping and small-town Americana nostalgia. Stockbridge is picture-perfect on both counts. Rockwell’s famous December 1967 cover for McCall’s magazine, entitled “Stockbridge at Christmas,” shows the town’s main street covered in a thin blanket of snow, set against the majestic backdrop of the Berkshire mountains. Rockwell lived in Stockbridge for many years, and a museum showcasing the largest collection of his art (as well as his old studio) still rests on the outskirts of town. We had a good laugh this morning when we realized that the painting we saw at the museum that we thought was Breaking Home Ties was an impostor.
As Mr. Gordon notes, Rockwell isn’t a favorite among art critics. Until recently he also offended the sensibilities of many cultural critics and scholars who resented his celebration of small-town America, which struck them as stodgy and conservative. Having grown up in a small town—Bordentown, New Jersey, founded in 1682, population 3,800, the sort of place where the old brick sidewalks buckle from the force of ancient tree roots—I viscerally understand what Rockwell was getting at. Such places are fewer in number than they once were, but they existed, and they were quite authentic. Just visit Stockbridge in December. It looks exactly as it did when Rockwell immortalized it. He wasn’t making it up, because he didn’t have to.
More to the point, critics have missed a subtle strain of social commentary in Rockwell’s art. It’s not just classic political works like The Problem We All Live With and New Kids in the Neighborhood, which tackled head-on (and with clear liberal sympathies) the issue of school and neighborhood desegregation, or the “Four Freedoms” series, which Rockwell designed for a war bonds drive, and which placed in visual perspective Franklin Roosevelt’s decidedly liberal vision of a postwar world free from material want and prejudice. This social commentary is also evident in works such as Breaking Home Ties, which shows the disconnect between a blue-collar man and his college-bound son. If the small-town world that Rockwell chronicled was overwhelmingly white, nevertheless it had undercurrents of class tension, and Rockwell captured these undercurrents with humor and sympathy.
Mr. Gordon is probably right about the causes of price inflation in the art market. More millionaires, fewer available works by the acknowledged masters. Normally I’m a little more critical of the invisible hand than Mr. Gordon, but in this case, I’d readily agree that the consumers of art have made a wise choice in their veneration of Norman Rockwell. Inherent in this choice is a wisdom that many critics have not yet caught onto.
November 30, 2006
Norman Rockwell and the Explosion of Wealth Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST It was quite a sale at Sotheby's yesterday. The previous record for an Edward Hopper had been $2.8 million, set in 1990. Yesterday one went for $26.8 million. The previous high for a Norman Rockwell, set just last May, was $9.2 million. His Breaking Home Ties went last night for $15.4 million. The Norman Rockwell painting has the sort of story behind it that no novelist could ever contrive, although I expect that didn’t affect its sale price. What interests me about the sale, however, is this. Back in 1961 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shelled out about $5 million to buy Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. The price was considered so extraordinary at the time that Time magazine ran a cover story on the purchase. Great Rembrandts rarely if ever come up at auction these days, so what that painting is worth today is anyone’s guess. (The current world-record price for a painting, a Jackson Pollack, is $140 million.) But even adjusting for inflation, the Met undoubtedly made a very good investment. While most assets have been appreciating over the last 50 years, one class of investments has, on average, done much better than more conventional stocks and bonds: those investments that have an absolutely fixed supply. There are only so many old master paintings, and most have, like Aristotle, now disappeared into museums, beyond the reach of even the most well-heeled collector. Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper painted only so many paintings. Likewise, rare books, vintage wines, and prewar Manhattan apartments have an utterly fixed supply. And the amount of wealth created in the last 50 years has skyrocketed beyond what anyone would have predicted. In 1982, in order to make the then brand-new Forbes 400 list, you needed a net worth (if I remember correctly) of $82 million. To be sure, $82 million today will still keep the wolf quite comfortably far from one’s door, but $82 million wouldn’t get you onto the Forbes 4,000, let alone the 400. That list this year had an admission price of over $1 billion. So the number of people with serious money to spend on things like paintings and rare books has been increasing rapidly while the supply has not increased at all, indeed decreased. You don’t have to be Adam Smith to figure out what happens if there is an ever-increasing demand for a fixed supply: Prices rise. If there is enough demand and a very small supply, prices go past the moon. Some, of course, have risen further than others. In 1961 Rembrandt was already the iconic Old Master, and his paintings always sold at top-of-the-market prices. But in 1961 Norman Rockwell was very much alive (he died in 1978), and his reputation among the largely self-appointed cognoscenti of the art world was dismal, dismissed as a mere illustrator, and a hopelessly sentimental one at that. Rockwell still doesn’t impress the art world much. The Metropolitan Museum, probably the most comprehensive art museum in the world, does not have a single work by him. But the art market is not the same thing as the art world, thank heavens. The Met had to shell out $5 million for its Rembrandt. But the family that sold the Rockwell yesterday for $15.4 million, bought it in 1960 for (are you sitting down?) $900. Even allowing for an approximately five-times inflation since then, it has appreciated by a factor of more than 3,000. Not even Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway has done that well in the stock market.
November 30, 2006
Peace and Globalization Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST In a piece in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune, Roger Cohen writes, in a chipper article on Chinese and Indian attitudes (“When War Is History, Let the Boom Begin”), that “these two leaders of the world’s most important emergent powers have understood that in the age of globalization the utility of wars has declined. It simply does not pay for big countries to go to war to get what they want.” Have they really? India is arming fast, and China faster. Their military expenditures are dwarfed by ours, but most of their military procurement policies are hard to explain if their elites wholly believe that it never pays for big countries to go to war. India faces a reckless adversary in Pakistan, but Indian strength is already more than sufficient to deter any rational Pakistani leadership, and it is not clear what level of armaments, if any, will deter an irrational adversary. China faces no discernible adversary, unless her leadership contemplates war with the United States over Taiwan. Given Chinese military procurement in the context of declared Chinese policy, which includes repeated if vague threats of war to secure Taiwan, it is hard to believe that all of the Chinese leadership thinks war does not pay under any circumstances. There are reasons to think that some Chinese leaders imagine a possible future of resource wars. There are also reasons to think that much of the Chinese leadership imagines that war between great powers is indeed a thing of the past, that war, as the grim old joke goes, is now a luxury only the poor can afford. But there have also been other moments when everyone agreed that great powers were so economically interdependent that war was deeply economically irrational and thus impossible. The most celebrated such moment was at the last peak of globalization—on the eve of the First World War. Another such moment was in the wake of the First World War, in a much less globalized world economy but at a time when many people had a peculiarly vivid sense of the unpredictability of war, and of its potentially horrific scale. That was on the eve of the Second World War. My own response to announcements that some political cultures have left war behind forever is much like my response to announcements that the rules of the stock market, or of the real estate market, have now changed forever and can never fall much below a current high-water mark. The response is that the study of history is not a wholly cheering enterprise, but it can spare you the embarrassment of saying some truly silly things.
November 29, 2006
The Pong Revolution Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:50 PM EST David Rapp’s AmericanHeritage.com piece today on Pong (“The Mother of All Video Games”) made me remember the oddly intense satisfaction of playing Pong in the early 1970s. As Mr. Rapp notes, people lined up for the right to pump quarters into the game when they encountered it in a bar, and my memory is that when a home version became available, adults—well, young adults—fought over the controls. Looking back on it, I suspect part of the pleasure was the rich, deeply pleasing and somehow persuasive sound the machine made when the bar of white light representing the paddle intersected the dot of white light representing the ball, coupled to the fact that the virtual paddle and the virtual ball seemed to obey the same physical laws as real ones did; it may sound strange to say this, but it was an astonishingly effective illusion. The game was by modern standards remarkably crude—as I remember it, a black-and-white screen with only one effective control, which let you move the paddle up and down on a single axis—but nothing else had ever looked and behaved like it. The modern video games I have seen always startle me by their absolutely unconvincing representation of whatever they are representing; Pong felt eerily real. Its charm probably derived from the collision of that apparent reality with its manifest and unique unreality. It was an image that seemed to behave like an object, and nothing had ever done that before. Although I spent my childhood watching ten or more hours of television a week, this game was the first TV-screen one anyone I knew had ever interacted with. It was gloriously new. More than a decade ago, maybe closer to two, I went out to the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, where a Pong set was proudly exhibited, with rather the same curatorial attitude that the British Museum might display in its placards for an exhibit of Etruscan or Inca toys. Seen in that museum, Pong already looked old, and it was almost incredible that it had ever given people such amazed delight. My sense of incredulity perhaps derived from the fact that I have found almost all subsequent video games barren sources of amusement. The only exceptions were a variant of Pong with a color screen, where the paddle made the ball demolish layers of colored brick-like shapes, and a truly wonderful game, again black and white, where two very simple icons representing spaceships, each possessing a limited supply of fuel, tried to shoot missiles at each other, with a variant that made the sun exert a gravitational field. These were a lot of fun, but they did not astonish. Pong, by contrast, had been something truly unprecedented; these were merely clever tweaks of the system. I think that if you played Pong when it first appeared, you experienced a sense of technophile wonder that was in its own small way more like the sensation felt by people who saw the first films than it was like almost any experience of a consumer product since that time. It was, I think, the first virtual reality most people had ever encountered. It was a new thing under the sun.
November 28, 2006
What Is a Populist? IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:15 PM EST First let me congratulate Fred Smoler on using the word demagogy instead of the awful demagoguery, which is far more common and, to my ear, an illiteracy, even though the dictionary accepts it. About the only linguistic minutia that irritates me more is when someone pronounces “coup de grâce” as “coo de grah.” That pronunciation, in French, means “blow of fat.” I think he is right that the difference between a populist and a demagogue is largely a matter of sincerity. Alas, that quality is in perennially short supply in the profession of politics. I’m reminded of the wonderful line in Stephen Sondheim’s masterful Into the Woods where Prince Charming, caught talking pure flummery, shrugs his shoulders and says, “I was raised to be charming, not sincere.”
Nowhere is this insincerity—across the political spectrum—more pronounced than on the subject of taxes. Every politician wants it both ways, raising lots of tax money while not losing any votes. As the late Senator Russell Long explained, “Don’t tax you, and don’t tax me. Tax the man behind the tree.” One way to accomplish this political sleight-of-hand over the years was to play the populist by socking it to the rich with a highly progressive marginal rate structure, while making sure the rich don’t have to actually pay those rates by providing endless deductions, allowances, credits, and a hundred other devices. The result is a tax code that is so complex no one understands it all and that produces grotesquely inequitable results. People with identical incomes can, and do, pay wildly varying “effective” tax rates—the percentage of income that is actually taxed away. The guy down the street with 10 times your income probably has a higher marginal rate (the tax on the last dollar earned), but it’s a very good bet that he has a lower effective rate, thanks to good lawyers and accountants and, perhaps, a cozy relationship with his local Congressman, who slipped an innocuous looking amendment into the tax code late one night that saved him big bucks. That’s why I favor a flat tax, with one marginal rate and absolutely no deductions or distinctions between forms of income, other than the direct cost of earning that income. Such a scheme (which is spreading rapidly in Eastern Europe and has even been adopted in Russia, of all places, greatly increasing government revenues there) makes insincerity very hard to hide. And a flat tax is, paradoxically, progressive in fact, taxing higher incomes at higher effective rates, which the present tax code most certainly is not. Populists should love it.
November 28, 2006
Populism, New Jersey Style II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST I’m sure Joshua Zeitz is correct about the power of “local control” in New Jersey politics. Local interests are a big problem in American politics generally, because of the nature of American government. Congressmen and senators (and their state equivalents) are elected locally and have powerful political incentives to protect local interests (and bring home the bacon in terms of construction projects and other “pork”). This is much less a problem in parliamentary systems, because party discipline, which is very weak in American politics, keeps it under firm control. I’d be interested to know if there is an equivalent term in British politics for “pork.” I don’t know of it. Politicians are in the reelection business first and foremost (there’s a reason why John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage is a short book). So when local interests are likely to trump national or state interests, a means must be devised to protect politicians’ interests in getting reelected by deflecting responsibility.
On the federal level, military base closings have been handled by commissions making recommendations and then Congress having to accept or reject the commission’s findings as a whole. In New York State today, a commission that has been working in secret will reveal its recommendations for hospital closings and reorganizations. These recommendations will become law unless either the governor or the legislature objects before the end of the year. I don’t know the details of the New Jersey constitution (hey! I can’t know everything), but I presume something similar might be arranged. A commission (the membership of which would be made up of eminent citizens working with experts, not politicians), would work in secret to devise a scheme to change local government in that state from one basically suited to the eighteenth century to one suited to the twenty-first. Once its work was done, the recommendations would have to be either accepted or rejected as a whole, perhaps by referendum. If the savings made possible by economies of scale were substantial enough, voters might well be willing to sacrifice some degree of local control in order to get genuine property-tax relief. If the commission struck the right balance, such a scheme might work, even though the forces that benefit from the status quo would fight tooth-and-nail to maintain it. The trick, perhaps, is to gore everyone’s oxen at the same time.
November 28, 2006
What Is a Populist? III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:15 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes that the dictionary offers two definitions for populist, one being a member of any political party claiming to represent the interest of the common people, the other the being “a believer in the rights, wisdom or virtues of the common people.” The first definition describes all modern political parties, few if any of which fail to make such a claim, the second describes what politicians operating under the rule of universal suffrage inevitably assert, although Mr. Gordon seems to suspect that they probably do not make this claim most convincingly in the immediate aftermath of lost elections. I share his suspicion. I do not find these very useful definitions, and my guess is that Mr. Gordon feels the same. Mr. Gordon then suggests that believers in free markets might be considered the true populists, which is clever, and in some cases even true, but runs afoul of some historical and much current usage, for example Mr. Uchitelle’s usage in the Times. I think that parties and politicians nowadays described as populist in economic terms instead often claim to protect “the common people” from the effects of markets (I am thinking of increased restraints on immigration or trade, which I oppose, but also of attempts to raise the minimum wage, which I support). To the best of my knowledge, no one uses the word in the sense Mr. Gordon perhaps whimsically offers as a linguistic innovation.
My guess is that Mr. Gordon does not use the word other than in its narrowest sense (a member of the party founded in 1891), and is gently suggesting that any other use of the word is problematic, because so few people admit, even to themselves, that they are working against the true interest of the majority. If so, he has a point. So now I am wondering why I use the word. Thinking this through a bit, I believe that in modern parlance “populist” implies at least two different things. In one meaning the word indicates a belief that the interests of ordinary people and elites are in at least some instances directly opposed, and in this sense a populist is someone who advocates the interests of ordinary people against the interests of elites. In the other sense the word means someone who either mistakenly or insincerely and opportunistically embraces a popular but mistaken economic (or other) prejudice. I think The New York Times article by Louis Uchitelle may have serially intended both meanings in the same piece of writing.
So I think I use the word to denote politicians who conceal and contradict their beliefs about our collective long-term interests when seeking votes—and also politicians who sincerely share popular but in my view false ideas about the interests of the majority (for example, Dick Gephardt’s support of protectionism during one presidential primary campaign). But at other times I say “populist” to praise politicians I imagine to be standing up for the interests of ordinary people, when those interests are opposed to at least some elite interests. Here’s where it gets tricky. My sincere belief in the merits of the minimum wage strikes me as populism in the good sense, but it presumably strikes Mr. Gordon as at best error, and if I am insincere about those merits, and running for office, demagogy. So my guess is that Mr. Gordon refuses the word because he suspects that one man’s populist is always another man’s demagogue, and that while it is worthwhile trying to determine whether economic ideas are true or false, it is less worthwhile trying to determine whether they are sincerely held.
I continue to use the word because populism is like that old saw about obscenity—you are pretty sure that you know it when you see it (in either sense of its meaning). On the other hand, distinguishing obscenity from erotica is a notoriously contentious business, similarly (good) populism and demagogy. I would like to thank Mr. Gordon for helping me think this through.
November 27, 2006
Populism, New Jersey Style Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST A quick note about “populism” in New Jersey. I’ve been a New Yorker for several years now, but I spent the first 18 years of my life in the Garden State. I also worked on several statewide and congressional campaigns before abandoning politics for academia. So it’s a part of the world I know somewhat well. John Steele Gordon is correct in identifying New Jersey’s arcane system of local government as the prime contributor to the state’s astronomically high property taxes. To New Jersey’s nonsensically decentralized school system one might add its municipal fire and police departments, which eat up enormous sums of tax dollars in the form of salaries, pensions, and benefits, as well as the time-honored custom by which every municipality, however small, engages the services of a municipal engineer and solicitor. Where I differ with Mr. Gordon is where I assign the credit or blame for this excessively expensive operating procedure. Mr. Gordon cites New Jersey as an example of government inefficiency and explains that a true populist is one who “believe[s] that economic decisions should be made, in so far as possible, by the free market (the common people in their millions buying and selling).” The trouble with this statement is that New Jersey’s electorate is stubbornly—one might say adamantly—wedded to decentralization. Local school districts and police departments are sacred cows in Garden State politics, somewhat akin to social security on the federal level. Politicians are free to inveigh against the evils of high property taxes, but they cannot and will not question the efficacy of local control. If they do, the voters punish them. If the metaphor of the free market carries over to electoral politics, then it only goes to show that the invisible hand, no matter where it wields its influence, is not invariably the most rational actor available. Just as New Jersey voters would save a lot of money by turning the organization of municipal services over to an elite management consultant, the American economy stands to gain extra efficiency from the interference of third-party institutions like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve Board. Populism is an attractive creed, but it isn’t necessarily the most rational. Just ask the “progressives.” Or do we not want to get bogged down in the definition of even more nettlesome historical terms?
November 27, 2006
In Defense of “Phony Diversity” II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “John Steele Gordon responded to my criticism of his statement that American history has been ‘very white and very male’ by attacking the University of Michigan’s support of affirmative action in college and graduate school admissions. This is one of Mr. Gordon’s favorite rhetorical devices: When he’s on shaky ground discussing apples, he shifts quickly to a discussion of oranges.” Hmmm, let’s see. My post to which he refers was sixteen paragraphs long and exactly one of them was about the University of Michigan’s position on affirmative action, which I used for illustrative purposes. So just who is changing the subject here? Having demonstrated his own mastery of dubious rhetorical devices, he then gets curious. “I’m curious as to whether Mr. Gordon thinks this list should be extended to include the children of alumni; the children of university donors and benefactors; the children of political and entertainment celebrities; students from select high schools; and persons from select geographic regions. College admissions officers routinely use these categories to favor candidates from wealthy and elite families, families with financial or legacy ties to their home institution, and candidates who hail from under-represented states and counties (the latter policy favors white rural applicants, among others).” Mr. Zeitz has left out one important category. Many colleges, including the University of Michigan, have been known to look with uncommon favor upon the applications of those who did very well on their high school football teams. I’m happy to satisfy his curiosity. I’d prefer it if admissions committees at highly competitive colleges did not know the names, addresses, races, religions, school and family ties, wealth and other non-germane information regarding the applicants they were considering. They should be judged by their academic achievements, characters, interests, etc. But, since this is not a perfect world, I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen. He writes, “Perhaps Mr. Gordon is consistent on this question. But I certainly don’t hear him crying out in righteous indignation that legacy applicants and the children of white farmers from Idaho enjoy extra privileges in the college admissions game.” Mr. Zeitz hasn’t heard me crying out in righteous indignation on any number of subjects that, were I so moved, I would cry out in righteous indignation on. There is a lot wrong with the world and one can soap-box on only so many subjects. In a post on the 100 most influential Americans, one should, I think, eschew righteous indignation on subjects that have nothing to do with the 100 most influential Americans, such as legacy admissions to colleges. Two anecdotes. 1) There was a boy two years ahead of me at school, nice kid, but no great brain, no great grades or tests scores, and an athletic ability that was the equal of mine (which is to say, nonexistent). Regardless, Harvard wrote him asking him to apply, which he did, and he was accepted. The fact that his last name was Roosevelt might account for that, I suspect. 2) A woman from a well-off but not fabulously wealthy WASPy family in New York (exactly the sort of family that might expect to have the most difficulty getting a borderline candidate son into Harvard) found herself sitting next to the dean of admissions at Harvard at a lunch one day not long after her son had, indeed, been admitted. They got to talking about how admissions decisions were made, and the dean told her that sometimes the decision is based on a seemingly trivial item. He told her about one iffy candidate who had recently been admitted basically because he kept a seven-foot boa constrictor as a pet. The woman looked at him for a second and then said, “Do you mean to tell me that my son got into Harvard because of that [participle form of a four-letter vigorous word] snake?”
November 27, 2006
What Is a Populist? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:30 PM EST The dictionary gives two definitions. The first is “a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people” especially members of the Populist Party (officially the People’s Party) organized in 1891. The second is “a believer in the rights, wisdom or virtues of the common people.” The Populist Party was based on agrarian interests and advocated among other things the “free coinage of silver.” While they never said so, of course, the free coinage of silver at a ratio to gold of 16 to 1 was a sure means of inducing inflation (silver, pouring out of Western mines since the 1870s, was then priced by the market at a ratio to gold of 22 or 23 to 1). Most farmers are debtors, and inflation helps debtors by making dollars cheaper relative to other stores of value, such as land and crops. The Populists therefore were catering to a particular “special interest,” the farmers, at the expense of another special interest, the bankers and creditors generally. The election of 1896 was fought largely over this issue, and William McKinley soundly beat William Jennings Bryan, the Populist candidate (as well as the Democratic one), 50.9 percent to 46.7 percent (minor candidates picking up the rest). So one might say that on the day after election day in 1896, the Populists (in the first sense of the word) were not populists (in the second sense). They discerned no wisdom or virtue in the choice the people had made. All American political parties claim to have the “people’s interests” at heart and to be the scourge of the “special interests” if elected. But in fact, “special interests” might well be defined simply as “the other party’s political base.” Debtors and creditors, labor unions and corporations, drug companies and patients, environmentalists and snowmobile fans, all are special interests. That is why I don’t think it was the American right that changed the meaning of the term (which dates to 1910 and was originally a euphemism for “lobbyists”); it was the people coming to realize that the left had special interests as well. Trade unions advocate what is good for trade unions (and, sometimes at least, their members), not what is good for the economy as a whole. The out-of-sight Medicaid costs in New York State (more than the costs of Texas and Florida combined) and the enormous political power of the Hospital Workers Union in New York are not unconnected. This is why politicians are so lousy at making economic decisions: They don’t really make them. They make political decisions, based on political interests, and economics be damned. Take ethanol. Every presidential hopeful—from the far left to the far right—trooping out to Iowa in the months before the Iowa caucuses has a good word to say for federal mandates regarding ethanol. The fact that ethanol is made from corn and Iowa grows a lot of the stuff has much more to do with their enthusiasm for ethanol than does economics. (As an aside, governments are also irremediably inefficient when it comes to organization and management, thanks to political considerations. The New York Times recently reported that New Jersey has no fewer than 619 school districts, each with an average of only 1,544 students and covering only 14 square miles, but each with a school board and bureaucracy, etc., in place. Of the 619 districts, 22 don’t even have any schools; they send the kids to other districts and pay tuition. Can anyone imagine a profit-seeking company with, say, 619 sales offices in New Jersey, 22 of which do nothing but send potential customers to other sales offices? New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the country. Gee, I wonder why.) One might argue that true populists—believers in the wisdom of the common people—are those, like myself, who believe that economic decisions should be made, in so far as possible, by the free market (the common people in their millions buying and selling). Politicians, of all stripes, are usually trying to make markets unfree to help their own special interests. Fortunately they have limited power to do so, partly because the other side can prevent it and partly because, as a Vietnamese proverb has it, “trying to stop a market is like trying to stop a river.”
November 27, 2006
In Defense of “Phony Diversity” Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon responded to my criticism of his statement that American history has been “very white and very male” by attacking the University of Michigan’s support of affirmative action in college and graduate school admissions. This is one of Mr. Gordon’s favorite rhetorical devices: When he’s on shaky ground discussing apples, he shifts quickly to a discussion of oranges. But he raises an important question.
Mr. Gordon supports a proposed amendment to the Michigan state constitution that would “ban public institutions from using affirmative-action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.” I’m curious as to whether Mr. Gordon thinks this list should be extended to include the children of alumni; the children of university donors and benefactors; the children of political and entertainment celebrities; students from select high schools; and persons from select geographic regions. College admissions officers routinely use these categories to favor candidates from wealthy and elite families, families with financial or legacy ties to their home institution, and candidates who hail from under-represented states and counties (the latter policy favors white rural applicants, among others).
Perhaps Mr. Gordon is consistent on this question. But I certainly don’t hear him crying out in righteous indignation that legacy applicants and the children of white farmers from Idaho enjoy extra privileges in the college admissions game. Neither do I hear conservative stalwarts like David Horowitz express much concern about these long-established forms of affirmative action.
There are two questions at play in this debate. First, is affirmative action legal? Second, does affirmative action enhance a university’s ability to educate its students? I’m not qualified to address the first question, and neither is Mr. Gordon. We’re not lawyers or constitutional scholars. My layman’s reading of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act leaves me with a lot of doubt about the constitutionality of affirmative action in college admissions, but to paraphrase an old adage, the law is what the courts say it is. In this instance, the courts have agreed that quotas, set-asides, and dual admissions standards are unconstitutional, but that race, gender, or ethnicity may be taken into extra account in the interest of securing diversity. This prevailing (if confusing) standard rests on the assumption that universities have a vested interest in, and right to pursue, diversity.
So does demographic diversity enhance a university’s ability to educate its students? Based on my six years as a university teacher, I believe so. In a 15-person seminar or discussion group, the makeup of the class largely determines the tenor and quality of the discussion. I suspect that most people who’ve taught in a university setting would agree. I can (and have) taught about the social construction of race to an all-white seminar, just as I can (and have) taught the history of gender to groups that were all-male or all-female. It works on some level. But the quality and depth of the discussion is generally much better when the seminar is diverse.
As an instructor I cannot choose my students. But given a choice, I’d much prefer to teach a group of students who bring diverse demographic and ideological perspectives to the table. I prefer it because my experience tells me that such groups achieve a higher level of discussion, which enables individual students to prosper more from the intellectual experience of the seminar. Just as it enhances the intellectual and cultural environment of a university to include musicians, artists, athletes, and activists, it enhances the intellectual and cultural environment of a seminar to include students from a wide variety of backgrounds.
The universities have presented the courts with precisely this argument, and to date the courts have allowed the universities some leeway in securing diverse student populations.
November 26, 2006
Iraq and Vietnam, Again Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 PM EST David Rieff has a piece in The New York Times Magazine today making one version of the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam: Iraq is like Vietnam in that we have lost a war, but nothing terribly bad is going to happen, because nothing terribly bad happened in Vietnam. Rieff opens very clearly: “As the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate and as policy makers debate how to extricate the United States honorably from what increasingly appears a war without end, it is worth remembering that all wars do end eventually, and that postwar relationships between the bitterest of enemies can turn out surprisingly well.” Did the Indochina wars turn out surprisingly well? The Cambodian genocide is rarely so described, but Mr. Rieff takes a longer view: President Bush just visited Vietnam, which Rieff concedes is “hardly a paragon of human rights” but points out is open to trade and investment. What did Tom Paine say—something about “strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated”—well, never mind. You do not have to sentimentalize eighteenth-century Americanism to find Rieff’s tones distasteful; I admit to nostalgia for a time, less than a decade ago, when liberals—I had thought Mr. Rieff was such a one—did not sound quite this much like apologists bravely speaking up for Pinochet’s Chile. A more immediate problem with this form of the Vietnam analogy is that Vietnamese Leninists are not obviously the same thing as the Islamists who seem likely to take power in Iraq. In fact, it is not too obvious that victory for any indigenous faction is going to come soon or produce an independent and unified Iraq with a government-enforced monopoly on violence, the way the Communist victory produced that kind of Vietnam. It is now fashionable to say that civil wars have to end, but we ought to remember that they do not have to end completely, or end well. The Russian civil war ended with the victory of the Bolsheviks, which became the victory of Stalin. I do not think the victory of Iraq’s Shiites, which seems a possible outcome, is going to be the equivalent of Stalin’s Soviet Union, but there are shades of bad that, although shy of that marker, are pretty bad indeed. Iraq’s Shiites do not have Leninist discipline; they are themselves factionalized. They may not win, or win any time soon. The Taliban won the Afghan civil war, at least for a while, but did not have the power to control all of their country. In Afghanistan, it was the almost completely victorious faction, not the unsubdued part of the country, that gave shelter to terrorists. In Iraq, if the Shiites control parts of the place and Sunnis other parts, it seems possible that different varieties of terrorists will be sheltered in different places: Al Qaeda in Sunnistan, Hezbollah-types in Shiastan, maybe bits of the PKK in hard-to-get-at bits of Kurdistan. But some people make David Rieff look like a paragon of intellectual honesty. Chuck Hagel, his eye on the Republican presidential nomination, has an op-ed in the Washington Post opining that “there will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis—not the Americans.” That last sentence sounds plausible, but the first one sounds startlingly dishonest. If Americans are driven from Iraq, and a swirling, murderous chaos takes deeper root there, or a vicious tyranny reimposes the sort of order Saddam maintained, will America not have suffered some kind of defeat? Will it not be seen to have suffered a defeat? Rieff, who insists we have already been irreversibly defeated, may minimize the probable consequences, but that is surely less contemptibly dishonest than Hagel’s insistence that no defeat is possible. Hagel goes on to insist “that regional powers will fill regional vacuums, and they will move to work in their own self-interest—without the United States. This is the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years.” Is that code for Iraq becoming a sphere of Iranian influence? No, reading more closely, I think Hagel means a joint Iranian-Syrian sphere of influence. It seems staggering—either staggeringly dishonest, staggeringly stupid, or staggeringly pessimistic—to call that “the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years.” Hagel may be right to think that any American military presence in Iraq is making a bad situation worse. But it cannot be right to utter Panglossian absurdities in the face of genuinely tragic events. My earnest hope is that Hagel is underestimating the electorate. If someone in your family died in Iraq, or suffered crippling wounds there, I think you are going to be very unlikely to call either protracted anarchy (a possibility Hagel tacitly acknowledges) or Iranian hegemony an outcome that justifies that sacrifice. And my guess is that even if you didn’t lose a son or daughter, those outcomes are going to look like an American defeat. Thinking it over, Hagel’s op-ed seems to me as great a piece of mendacity on the subject of war as has ever been uttered by an American politician. Reagan didn’t call the evacuation of American troops from Beirut an American victory. He did call the occupation of Grenada “our finest hour,” which may have puzzled any surviving Spitfire pilots who survived the summer of 1940, but that is merely pardonable exaggeration by the new Hagelian standard.
November 26, 2006
What Is a Populist? Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:55 PM EST An article in today’s New York Times Week in Review, by one of the Times’s best economics writers, Louis Uchitelle, is titled “Here Come the Economic Populists” and argues that there is now a split in the Democratic Party, with rising hostility to the neoliberal consensus associated with the Clinton administration generally and with former treasury secretary Robert Rubin in particular. The neoliberal consensus stressed freer markets both locally and globally. Hostility to those policies are energized by a sense that most people’s incomes are stagnant and their job security consistently eroding, and the next Congress will see some tensions within the Democratic majority. As a broad-strokes account this seems right, but Uchitelle’s article does not address one broader question. By his account, new policies embraced by some “populists” include raising the minimum wage, subsidizing college tuition, expanding the earned income tax credit, allowing the government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicaid, increasing social security benefits, and beginning to create government-subsidized universal health care. Other new policies would stop liberalizing trade, indeed possibly reverse that process, and make it harder to lay off workers. This mix of ideas—in my opinion, some of them pretty good, some of them pretty bad—made me wonder, what do we nowadays mean by an economic populist? What do we now mean by a populist, period? The connotation of the word has changed a few times over my lifetime. When I was a small boy, “populist” still meant “good and democratic” and denoted someone taken to have been in favor of the New Deal before we had a phrase for the idea. On this theory populists fought for the little guy, and against “special interests,” which in those days meant malefactors of great wealth rather than trade unions and civil rights groups (redefining “special interests” has been one of the most remarkable achievements of the American right). When I was in high school, populists had been redefined as more complicated and morally ambiguous types, initially economic reformers on the first model who had a nasty tendency to turn into racist demagogues. After I finished graduate school, “populists” also implied people who embraced what the professional consensus thought some very bad economics. The word had also expanded its definition to denote a few rightist forms of what were in some senses anti-elite politics: elements of Thatcherism and Reaganism. I have the impression that there has been a move from the academic left to rehabilitate some of the older American populists, the ones who were idolized when I was a boy and pilloried when I was a teenager, but I wouldn’t swear to this. If there has been such a move, it may be in part the result of new research, in part the result of an erratic unease on the academic left about positioning oneself as a critic of populist movements. It is okay to criticize populist racism and homophobia, less okay to criticize populist economics, possibly because a number of left academics do not themselves repose much trust in the professional consensus of economists. “Economic populism” in its pejorative sense implies economic policies that seem to favor ordinary people but that in the long run will damage most people’s interests. By this account, economists practice a complicated discipline, one that yields some counterintuitive results, and ordinary people are likely to get economics wrong. I have some sympathy for elements of this view: I think the evidence supports the net advantages of free trade, while relatively few people seem to grasp this fact, even in countries where neoliberalism is the dominant intellectual position (in other countries—France, for example—there is evidence that even political elites fail to understand the net advantages of freer trade). Is the consensus of professional opinion a sufficient guide to policy? One problem is that economists themselves change their views of best practice. Decreased regulation of the economy was best practice in 1776 and remained so for a long time; increased regulation of the economy became best practice between the 1930s and the 1970s; decreased regulation at that point got a big boost, etc. You never know when a politician is ahead of the curve. On the question of the minimum wage, professional opinion is changing, but the plurality is still in one or another sense hostile. Another problem is that even if you subscribe to the professional consensus, where there is one, best theoretical practice may result in a lost election, and new economic policies that make life even worse. The best is sometimes the enemy of the good, and sane politicians usually make compromises with electoral reality. Yet another problem is that professional opinion is sometimes wrong. Nineteenth-century “race science” was vicious hooey, despite the fact that Harvard taught the subject, and nineteenth-century race science survived long into the twentieth century. There are comparable events in the history of economic thought. One more problem: the same policies are sometimes described as populist, sometimes not. “Soak the rich” was a populist economic slogan. A sharply progressive income tax, even if it is broadly popular, is less likely to be described as a populist measure, and while Louis Uchitelle’s article implies the opposite, using revenues derived from a progressive income tax to expand the earned income tax credit does not strike my ear as “populist economics,” at least when it is so described (Nixon proposed something similar: when he did so, was he an economic populist, or a good Keynesian?). So if the other bloggers are interested: How do you nowadays use the word populist?
November 26, 2006
Revisiting the Draft III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:25 PM EST The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a long editorial on Charles Rangel’s proposal, which had some very interesting numbers from a Heritage Foundation report, which can be found here .
Since the first draft law, during the Civil War, in which those with the money ($300) could buy their way out, it has always been said that “it is a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight,” that the wealthier parts of society get us into wars, and benefit from them, but that it is the poor who have to fight—and all too often die—in order to win them. This has certainly been the mantra of Charlie Rangel and many others on the left (and is surely the origin of Senator John Kerry’s now infamous “joke”), that the military recruits disproportionately come from the poorest segment of American society. But, as I have long argued, when it comes to foreign and military issues, the left is stuck in 1968. I would again recommend Max Boot’s War Made New for a good overview of how much the military has changed, both in personnel and in equipment and tactics, since the Vietnam War. It is not your father’s army anymore.
That the poor make up the bulk of the military, it would seem, is no longer the case. According to the Journal, “The percentage of recruits from the poorest American neighborhoods (with one-fifth of the U.S. population), declined from 18 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in 2003, 14.1 percent in 2004, and 13.7 percent in 2005. Put another way, if military burdens aren’t spread more evenly among socio-economic groups in the U.S., it’s because the poor are underrepresented.”
While slightly less than 80 percent of young Americans have high school degrees, 97 percent of military recruits do. And the intellectual quality of these recruits has been going up, not down, since 9/11. The percentage of recruits who are, by the military’s definition, “high quality” rose from 57 percent in 2001 to 67 percent in 2004.
When broken down by race, blacks, whites, and Hispanics are all represented at percentages close to their percentages of the total population (Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, for reasons unknown to me, are greatly over-represented in the military as compared with their percentage in the population as a whole).
Unless the Heritage Foundation report is seriously flawed, it would seem that the modern American military is a pretty fair mirror of the population of young American as a whole, exactly what, in an ideal world, it should be. Perhaps the strongest motive for joining the military these days is not to escape grinding poverty but—thanks to educational incentives for enlisting—to escape being saddled with huge debts to finance college.
Another point: About 4 million people turn eighteen every year. If a draft were instituted, what on earth would we do with them all? The entire active-duty military today is less than 1.4 million. If many would not be called, how would that be handled fairly? With such a vast recruitment pool, physical standards would be very high and thus escaping the draft for physical reasons would be relatively easy, encouraging cheating. And the cost of housing, training, and equipping such a huge number would be astronomically expensive. How would it be paid for? Veterans’ benefits would saddle the federal government with vast future obligations.
Mr. Rangel knows all this perfectly well, of course; he is a very smart and politically savvy man. He knows that his proposal has about as much chance of being enacted, even in a Democratic Congress, as a resolution against Mom and apple pie. The military needs to change in fundamental ways (again, I recommend Max Boot on the subject), but the days when wars were fought with enormous numbers of boots on the ground are probably over for good. As we have found out in Iraq, winning the war, in the sense of occupying the enemy’s territory, is easy for the only military great power left in the world. Winning the peace afterwards, however, has proved to be very, very difficult, requiring all sorts of new expertise that the military has been reluctant to develop. Saddling it with 4 million angry recruits who want only to be out of uniform would make that job even more difficult.
November 25, 2006
Revisiting the Draft II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:55 PM EST Josh Zietz posted a few days ago on “Revisiting the Draft,” commenting on Rep. Charles Rangel’s suggestion that we bring it back. Rangel was eerily confident that a draft would significantly diminished the chances of a bellicose foreign policy: “There’s no question in my mind that this President and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way.” Maybe, but there is another way to look at it. Take as the model of a conscript force the most celebrated one we ever raised, and the one Josh concludes by suggesting we revive. At its maximum size during the Second World War, the Army numbered around 8.3 million, and there were another 4 million in the other armed services. This was less than a tenth of the population, most women did not serve, and it is worth remembering that by comparison to the other belligerents, the United States maintained extremely high physical standards for military service over the whole of the war. Scaling that number up for the current U.S. population, maintaining high physical standards, and assuming that in a feminist age women are also conscripted, you’d get a military force of more than 60 million (while at war, we could replace World War II–style female labor in the domestic economy with immigrant guest workers). The American standing army wouldn’t be that large—although it would be by all historical standards enormous—but with the trained reserves available under conscription, it could expand to that size very quickly, probably in a couple of weeks; after all, major European states could that rapidly expand their conscript forces a century ago. Assume that Americans someday again buy what Rep. Rangel calls flimsy evidence—after all, we bought some in 2003—and are as committed to military victory as we were during the Second World War, and as uninhibited about inflicting collateral damage. That still means we’d be more inhibited than the British were during the Second World War. And a decrease in inhibition seems likely: When everyone’s husbands and sons are serving, and thus at risk—in this case, their wives and daughters, too—the electorate usually becomes less chary about inflicting collateral damage on enemy civilians. My guess is that if we someday fight what now seem the likeliest future antagonists, their use of suicide bombers of all ages and sexes, along with other systematic breaches of the laws of war, could easily make us at least as savage as we were in World War II. With that much force and those attitudes, my guess is that we would eventually be tempted to conquer and pacify a fair swath of the Islamic world, let alone Iraq. With that much force, the threat of post-conquest counterinsurgency campaigns would not necessarily put us off. After all, successful guerrilla wars are actually pretty rare, and losing a truly savage conventional war usually makes the defeated unwilling to protract the conflict with guerrilla methods (neither the astonishingly determined Germans nor the even more obdurate Japanese gave that possibility much of a thought). And my hunch is that if you give the government that much military power, you will probably eventually elect one that will decide to use it. So I think Rep. Rangel should be wary of spreading the losses of war over a wider and more representative section of the population; we have some evidence of what happens under those circumstances. There is an interesting theory holding, on the basis of significant evidence extending back to the ancient republics, that democracies are the among the most bellicose of regimes. Some of the theorists, seeking to explain that outcome, suggest the democracies are bellicose because their legitimacy is relatively great, which makes it easier for them to raise overwhelming forces, and hence much less likely to lose wars. If the theory is correct, a mass citizen army is not going to make the United States less likely to steer clear of war, especially in the face of some gross provocations like the 1979 seizure of our embassy in Tehran, or terrorists attacks on American soldiers and civilians by Syrian or Iranian surrogate forces, or even the murder of our government’s civilian employees by Palestinian Authority–backed Palestinian militias in Gaza, which happened a couple of years ago. If you consider the provocations we have ignored, it becomes clear that since we abandoned conscription, the American democracy has not in fact been all that bellicose, in large part because even with the most capable armed forces in the world we have not possessed so much force that the use of force seemed very cheap. Rep. Rangel might want to think twice about lowering the perceived risk of defeat, and hence the cost of war.
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