The blog will be dark today as I tend to family stuff. Meantime, watch Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service debate the question that is on all the kids’ minds these days: Was Trotsky a good guy or a bad guy?
Monthly Archive for April, 2010
There’s been plenty of excellent commentary on the new Arizona anti-immigration statute. (And one can be excused for thinking that the epithet “Draconian” was an actual, formal part the law’s name). I have a deep, abiding hostility to the law on libertarian grounds. I won’t be able to delineate all of my objections, and indulge all of my specious conspiracy theories and slippery-slope sophistry in this one post. But I’ll start in on them.
The law states:
For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency…where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person…
Many have noted the elasticity of the phrases “lawful contact” and “reasonable suspicion.” These words have a body of legal precedent behind them. Reasonable suspicion is one of the lowest standards of proof, but any investigatory stop is considered a seizure under the Fourth Amendment, and any seizure requires a clear, articulable reason for suspecting criminal activity.
I’m actually much more worried about the “lawful contact” provision, mostly because I know less about it, and it seems far more open to the subjective discretion of the individual officer. But let’s say it means a legitimate traffic stop. How then is a cop supposed to have any opinion whatsoever on the documentation status of the car’s passenger(s)? A law professor in this Byron York column gives the cartoon example of a car stopped for speeding on a known smuggling route, and the car is overloaded with hispanic people who are acting evasively. (Though of course, the professor does not actually say the people in his example are hispanic. That was my extraordinary power of analytic inference at work, dear reader.) The point is, beyond cartoon examples, one’s immigration status is very hard to divine without gross stereotyping and overt racial profiling, which of course is strictly prohibited in this law.
Now the law also says that the presentation of a valid Arizona drivers’ license will be taken as proof that the person is a legal resident. But what if the lawful contact with the police officer is precipitated by, say, jaywalking, and the jaywalker isn’t carrying a license? If possession of a license dispels suspicion, does then the absense of a license compound suspicion? This seems grotesque, and would appear to require everyone to carry identification with them at all times; turning a once-voluntary action into a necessary means of preempting suspicion of illegal activity. No one in this country should feel coerced, however gently, into engaging in exculpatory behavior every time they venture outside their front door.
Maybe you think my critique stems from an unfounded paranoid fear of the creation of a “Your papers, please” type of dystopia. Byron York has your back:
No, we are not confronted by actors with heavy German accents demanding our papers. We are instead confronted routinely by people of all stripes asking to see our driver’s license. When we board an airplane, we are asked to produce a government-issued photo ID, usually a driver’s license. When we make some credit- or debit-card purchases in department stores, we are asked to produce a driver’s license. When we enter many office buildings, both private and government, security guards often ask us to produce a driver’s license. When we go to doctors’ offices and hospitals, we are asked to produce a driver’s license. When we check into hotels, we are asked to produce a driver’s license. When we purchase some over-the-counter drugs, we are asked to produce a driver’s license. If we go to a bar or nightclub, anyone who looks at all young is asked to produce a driver’s license. And needless to say, if we have any encounter with police or other authorities, we are asked to produce a driver’s license.
For some reason York thinks this is a reason to welcome the spectre of more document checkpoints in our life. I could not disagree more. The steady increase in the number of activities that now require the brandishing of a drivers’ license is called “function creep.” York finds comfort for additional intrusion into our individual liberty by citing the history of past intrusions. I find that logic to be as bizarre as it is discomforting.
York’s argument also has in it a whiff of the abominable authoritarian instinct of: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Why shouldn’t we be made to produce evidence that we can lawfully operate a motor vehicle, if it alone will remove suspicion of unrelated wrongdoing? Daniel Larison, normally so good, explicitly makes this point:
Unless there is another undesirable provision that critics of the law have failed to mention, it would seem that the only people who have reason to complain about this law are those who are here illegally and those who believe that immigration laws should simply not be enforced.
My point is that this law will either go unenforced, or else it will be enforced capriciously. I see no other option. And it’s useful to remember that the best definition of tyranny is simply this: capricious law. Contrary to Larison’s claim, I have reason to complain; to complain about the subtle but inexorable drift towards the presumption of guilt as the new standard for a new age; an age characterized by more mandated disclosure, more distrust between ruler and ruled, more unexamined and undue deference to authority, more codification of the odious politics of “protection”; and an increasing familiarity on the part of ordinary people with the powers of the state to coerce, to cajole, to “suspect”, to demand. No, there is no “Papers, please” level of despotism here. But the people of Arizona are sure closer than they were last week.
I’ve been reading a lot about the Goldman Sachs SEC controversy, and I watched some of the Senate hearings yesterday, in an attempt to discern what the hell is going on, and specifically if there was impropriety or not. I’m at the point in my research where every subsequent argument I read becomes my new position, until I read something else. Anyway here’s what I’ve learned so far:
There’s a difference between being a bit of a dick (selling something you know to be junk to a client who may not know how junky it is (this is maybe the equivalent of storefront psychics), then betting that the junk will fail, as junk tends to do); perpetuating a fraud (not disclosing to the client that you yourself built the junk that you are selling to him and you have a financial interest in its failure); and being neither a dick nor a fraud, and simply performing due diligence in hedging your long exposure with short bets (Yglesias has a very good discussion on examples of legitimate hedging). The Economist DiA blog has a good post on the sometimes fine distinction on Wall Street between being a dick and being a fraud. Christopher Beam at Slate also attempts to parse the difference between criminals and dicks:
Because there’s no law against being a jerk, public shaming would have to do. “You say nothing you heard today troubled you,” Levin said to Blankfein toward the end of the hearing. “That concerns me, and it concerns a lot of people in this country. You shouldn’t be selling junk. You shouldn’t be selling crap. You shouldn’t be betting against your own customer you’re simultaneously selling to.” It’s not a crime. It’s just a shitty thing to do.
I imagine a big part of the SEC case will be argued right on the line at which shitty things cross over into illegal things. Should be interesting.
There’s another interesting theme in the commentary surrounding the Goldman case, and the financial crisis in general. It’s how we express our outrage over the immorality or illegality of the behavior of financial institutions by comparing them to casinos or to Las Vegas.
Today’s New York Time’s editorial is in fact called “Wall Street Casino”, and it claims that “[b]anks like Goldman turned the financial system into a casino.” Yesterday at the Senate hearing, Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) said: “People feel like you are betting with other people’s money and other people’s future. Instead of Wall Street, it looks like Las Vegas.” (Never mind that Pryor seems to have a very bizarre understanding of what happens in Las Vegas.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this tendency the Ludic Fallacy. It’s basically when one mistakes the random, chaotic, unpredicable risk encountered in the real world for the highly controlled, highly sterilized, highly predictable risk that is found inside a casino. Life is, in fact, not a crapshoot. The odds in casino games are mathematical certainties, and over a long timeline the distribution of outcomes will fall on the Gaussian bell curve. Such easily computable risk as is found inside a casino doesn’t really occur in the real world. Yet we insist on the analogy nonetheless.
Though Senator Pryor was almost right. In one important way Wall Street does represent itself as a casino. Wall Street also fell for the Ludic Fallacy. The lords of finance fooled themselves, and us, into thinking that the type of uncertainty in their world was as easy to tame and to mathematize as the uncertainty found inside a casino. Easier, in fact. Lots of people became very invested in this fallacy; and as I’ve noted before, if you can enable people to better rationalize their delusion by drumming up some new equations that purport to prove it, you’ll probably get a Nobel Prize for it.
There’s also another way that Wall Street banks might resemble casinos: Their products increasingly provide no useful social function whatsoever. In Slate, Eliot Spitzer (another guy of whom it’s appropriate to ask whether he’s a dick or a fraud) actually makes this point very well:
In the traditional model, investment banks are thought to serve two critical functions. First, they are financial intermediaries: They are the conduits for transferring savings to those sectors of the economy that need capital….They enable productive companies to access the capital markets so they can grow their businesses. Second, they are supposed to be market makers that provide liquidity and stability in the markets to permit the free flow of capital on an ongoing basis.
The question that must now be asked is: Are investment banks doing that? Are they doing the things that merit public support at all? Or are they just running a casino with products that have no great social utility? The regulators, legislators, and investigators have not focused on the fact that the fundamental business of banking has changed from capital allocation to, essentially, gambling.
Astonishingly, Spitzer then argued that the high-class prostitution business actually has far more social utility than either Wall Street or casinos. A bit awkward I thought.
Actually, he ends with this:
We taxpayers have given them billions upon billions upon billions based on the theory that they perform economically useful activities. They need to prove that they do.
I certainly agree.
In this excellent TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely talks about how we are not nearly as in command of our own decisions as we think we are. We like to flatter ourselves by thinking that all of the decisions we make are the result of a rational deliberative process balancing risk and reward; a direct reflection of our individual will. In fact, all of our decisions are highly manipulable; contingent on the domain in which we are making them, and on the choice architecture that is presented to us.
Mostly this insight is put to use by advertisers and retailers in getting us to spend money on stuff we don’t really want or need. Jonah Lehrer recently profiled retail giant Costco, and explained how each tiny detail of the Costco shopping experience is really a subtle act of "psychological manipulation"; meant to shut off the part of your brain that makes you wary of a bad deal, and activate the part of your brain that craves pleasure:
Just look at the interior of a Costco warehouse. It’s no accident that the most covetous items are put in the most prominent places. A row of high-definition televisions surrounds the entrance. The fancy jewelry, Rolex watches, iPods and other luxury items are conspicuously placed along the corridors with the heaviest foot traffic. (The fresh food is always located in the back of the store, so that we have to parade past the profitable aisles of temptations.) And then there are the free samples of food, liberally distributed throughout the store. The goal of Costco is to constantly prime the pleasure centers of the brain, to keep us lusting after things we don’t need. Even though we probably won’t buy the Rolex, just looking at the fancy watch makes us more likely to buy something else, since the coveted item activates the NAcc. We have been conditioned to crave a reward.
But it’s not enough to just excite the NAcc: retailers must also inhibit the insula. This is where Costco really excels. When consumers are repeatedly assured that low prices are "guaranteed," or told that a certain item is on sale, the insula stops worrying so much about the price tag.
So this is how we end up buying those 300 rolls of paper towels or a lifetime supply of AA batteries. But for a few years now, behavioral economists have been trying to apply our hopeless manipulability and irrationality to more productive ends, by figuring out how to "nudge" us into making better choices, or affecting positive policy outcomes. In fact, the book that describes this idea is called Nudge, written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
A perfect example of how nudging works is shown in Dan Ariely’s chart on organ donation enrollment rates around the world (sorry it’s a little fuzzy):
As Dan explains in his talk, these results aren’t intuitive in any way. Culture cannot explain Denmark at 4% enrollment and Sweden at 85%, or Germany’s 12% and Austria’s 100%. The only difference between the gold countries and the blue ones is how the organ donation form is set up at the DMV. In gold countries, it’s "check here if you want to be an organ donor", while in the blue countries, it’s "check here if you don’t want to be an organ donor". Dan explains that since we don’t really like grappling with complex decisions, and we greatly prefer the status quo, we never end up checking the box, and the default choice almost always carries the day.
Advertisers and retailers have been using these insights to manipulate us for decades. But this research has huge potential implications for a wide range of human activities: how we eat, how we save for retirement, how we use energy.
A piece in Time magazine last year noted that the Obama White House loves these sorts of nudging programs (Cass Sunstein now is working for the administration). A proper nudge always lets people make any choice they want, but it recognizes that how the choice is presented matters a great deal. Sunstein and Thaler call it "libertarian paternalism." Their point is yes, putting the healthy food at the front of the cafeteria is paternalistic; but if you put the junk food in front, it’s still paternalistic, just in the other direction. There’s no such thing as a completely neutral choice architecture.
The Obama administration used nudge insights in the big stimulus bill last year. The bill included over $100 billion in payroll tax cuts. But rather than send everybody one big rebate check, we instead saw an incremental decrease in our paycheck withholdings. Since stimulating consumer demand was the point, the administration wanted us to spend the extra money. Behavioral economics shows that we are more likely to save a big conspicuous windfall, whereas we’re more likely to not notice, and therefore spend, a smaller, gradual reward. So much to his political detriment, Obama did not go out of his way to advertise the tax cut, since the more we were aware of it, the less likely we’d be to spend it.
People have responded quite well to being nudged, since we always do retain a choice, and since many of the target nudge policies are things that we ourselves say we want (for instance, the phenomenal success of automatic 401k enrollment).
But a new piece at Slate shows that good old toxic partisanship can get in the way of an otherwise productive nudge.
Another insight of behavioral economics is that we really care what our peers are doing, and we constantly measure ourselves against them so as to remain ensconsed in that American utopia known as "above average." The idea is to use this innate peer pressure and competitiveness instinct to nudge us into making some better choices. For example, the Slate article notes that if a hotel wants its guests to reuse their towels, they need only tell people that the majority of other guests choose to reuse their towels. This tiny bit of suggestion increases towel reuse rates by 34% over telling guests to do it for the sake of the enviroment.
So far, so good. But a pilot study in California to try and get people to use less energy at home wasn’t quite as successful. A utility company started sending customers Home Energy Reports, with a bar showing your household energy use next to bars showing how much energy your average neighbor used. If you were better than average, you got a smiley face. If you were worse than average, you got a "Room to Improve" message. The results turned out to be highly influenced by political affiliation:
For liberals who started out as heavier-than-average consumers, the reduction [in energy use] was almost 6 percent. Republicans who live in conservative neighborhoods (and hence had no neighborly pressure to conserve) and had no record of giving to environmental organizations actually increased their consumption by 1 percent.
First of all, I’d like to point out the cognitive dissonance in saying that conservatives felt no pressure to conserve. That this sort of logical absurdity is accepted as political reality is really upsetting. The proud anti-environmentalism of the Republican party really gives credence to my dodgeball theory of political differentiation from a few weeks ago.
Anyway, yes, the idea is that Republicans may have increased their energy use out of spite, in response to being told that they should decrease it, since energy conservation is perceived as a liberal hobbyhorse. This is dispiriting, but fascinating.
As Dostoyevsky writes, people are inclined to assert their own volition rather than bow to reason or rationality. People don’t always correct their behavior when nudged, "but on the contrary would deliberately do something out of sheer ingratitude in order, in fact, to have their own way."
The enduring appeal of 2+2=5 will be an interesting challenge to the nudge optimists out there, and it could serve as a formidable impediment to the sort of transformational changes in behavior that are needed to tackle our collective problems.
Via Yglesias: This piece in the LA Times is about how Hamas’s more moderate behavior of late is playing on the streets of Gaza:
Hamas, the Palestinian faction viewed by many in the West as a nest of terrorists and Islamic hard-liners, is battling a curious new epithet: moderate.
Fifteen months after a punishing Israeli offensive failed to dislodge Hamas from power in the Gaza Strip, rival resistance groups and some former supporters say the organization has become too political, too secular and too soft.
Interesting! This is from a graduate school paper I wrote in 2006:
We have seen Hamas moderate its methods since deciding to become more active in the political process, leaving the bus-bombing to its more sanguinary-minded cousins at Islamic Jihad during the run-up to the 2005 elections. Hamas, however, faces the same existential dilemma of all resistance movements that cease to resist. […]
This sets up an interesting analogy: Just as the peace compromises of Arafat—and their failure to improve the lives of the Palestinian people—led directly to Hamas’s ascendancy and the eventual marginalization of the PLO, so too now might the truce-making, moderating Hamas factions carve out an opening for the decidedly uncompromising members of Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa. Will these more extremist elements start hitting the campaign trail themselves, brandishing their bloody and uncompromising resistance credentials, as opposed to the perceived political fecklessness of the Hamas leadership?
LA Times piece:
"People in the street say Hamas has changed," said Abu Ahmed, spokesman for the military wing of Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian armed group in Gaza that complained recently that Hamas had arrested four of its militants as they tried to attack Israeli soldiers near the border. "They’re paying a price for that. People need to know that Hamas is still committed to the resistance."
My 2006 paper:
As ultra-hardliners in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade remain opposed to any compromise with Israel, it will be interesting to see whether this increases the prospects of an internecine fight with the more moderate factions of Hamas and Fatah.
How about my analogy to Arafat losing legitimacy after his perceived moderation failed to improve the lives of his people? How’s it working out for Hamas? LA Times:
But on the streets of Gaza, where half the people are unemployed and more than 70% rely on international aid to survive, there’s a growing frustration. Skeptics say Hamas has little to show for its political overtures.
It’s very much worth adding that Hamas and Arafat had little to show for both their moderate overtures and for their extremism, in terms of tangible benefits for their people. It’s obviously not the moderation qua moderation that is causing unemployment and hardship in Gaza City. And as the article points out, moderate is a bit relative here: Hamas is still committed to Israel’s destruction and receives tons of financial and military aid from Iran.
The paper I wrote was terribly organized and pretty awful in general, but a little bit prescient in that one case at least.
Sue Lowden is a Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada, and she’s currently beating Harry Reid in the polls by a pretty large margin. This video has made the intertube rounds the last few days, and it’s too awesome not to share:
All the great jokes about this have already been made. Matt Yglesias notes:
Checkups for chickens might work if we were all farmers, but what’s a blogger supposed to do? Maybe I could offer the guy free publicity with a few posts touting his services. A Web designer could build a website for the doctor. But what does the designer do if he needs to see the doctor again? Or what if the doctor needs to run a test that costs money, do you mail a chicken to the lab?
One of his commenters answers sensibly:
Don’t be silly. We’d use representations of chickens. Eventually, we could just keep electronic tabs on how many representations of chickens we have, and transfer them virtually. But, and this is important, the chickens must be somewhere… or, possibly, we could use bars of chicken boullioun.
The chicken buillion is an especially nice touch. But jokes (and abject terror that a person like this is so close to the halls of power) aside, it does bring up the issue of what did happen before there was health insurance. You know, in Ms. Lowden’s "olden days" where every girl had a pony and every poor person had sackfuls of chickens everywhere.
Fire insurance began in America in the mid-18th century. In the mid-19th century, accident and disability insurance started becoming more popular, mostly targeting railroad and steamboat workers. Hospital and medical expense insurance began to take off in the first half of the 20th century, and employer-based health benefits exploded in the 1940s as a way to attract workers amid stringent federal wage controls.
If your house burned down before there was such a thing as fire insurance, you either rebuilt your house or you became homeless. Those who could rely on a social capital network of friends and family to help them through were a whole lot better off than those who couldn’t. Maybe some of your neighbors would donate their time and money to help you out, and maybe some local lumber dealers would give you a good deal. Or maybe not.
If you got sick before health insurance was widespread, I see three main outcomes: you either paid for care; received free or subsidized care from merciful doctors; or you went without care. No doubt doctors provided much more free care than they do now. They were able to charge their affluent patients whatever price they though appropriate, with no third-party bureaucrat setting their reimbursement rates. This surely allowed them to dispense more of their services for free or at reduced rates to those who couldn’t afford it. In other words, in the pre-insurance health economy, the rich subsidized the poor. Does Ms. Lowden approve of that in principle? But of course, most of the time the poor just went without care.
I wonder why Ms. Lowden thinks providers would be eager to return to the days of bartering their services to poor people or offering free care out of a sense of duty. Right now, about 28% of all doctors are not accepting any new Medicaid patients. For general practitioners or internists the number is closer to 40%. Though Medicaid is cheap—only paying about 72% of what Medicare pays for the same procedure—it does pay actual money and not chickens. If providers don’t want the guaranteed Medicaid money, why would they want the unguaranteed chickens from Bowden’s resurrected barter economy utopia?
I am guessing Sue Bowden has not thought too hard about the health care issue and is just trying to get some mileage out of a folksy appeal to the type of people who think "In the olden days…" is the beginning of a can’t-lose argument.
A few weeks ago I wrote a bit about Britain’s upcoming national election. My natural American cynicism about the viability of third parties led me to poke some fun at Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. But even before Clegg’s breakout performance in the first-ever prime ministerial debate last Thursday (watch it here), by any definition the Lib Dems were already "viable". Since the 1980′s they have consistently pulled in around 20% of the national popular vote. In the last election in 2005 it was 22%. But due to the vagaries of the UK electoral map, that 22% of the total vote only translated to 9% of the seats in parliament.
So here’s a little British electoral politics review. Skip this post if you don’t give a crap. Though you’ve probably already stopped reading if you don’t give a crap.
Third-party hopeful Nick Clegg absolutely dominated the debate according to public opinion polls, and his performance has led to an amazing rise in the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats. With the election two weeks away, they’re essentially neck-and-neck with David Cameron’s Conservatives, with Gordon Brown’s Labour a close third. Yet unless the Lib Dems earn a sweeping and broad national victory, their proportion of seats in parliament will probably only go up marginally.
In the British general election it’s "First Past the Post", meaning winner takes all in each MP district. Even with their surge in support, the fear is that the Lib Dems may just end up running up the score in areas where they’re already strong, which would do nothing for them in parliament. So just as Republicans and Democrats target swing congressional districts and presidential swing states, the Lib Dems need to find a way to flip lots of seats that are marginally held by Labour or the Conservatives. Tough to do, since the other parties are also targeting all the marginal seats.
Not surprisingly, one of the central issues in the Lib Dem platform is election reform, and the adoption of proportional representation in parliament. This would smooth out that disparity between their popular vote totals and their parliament seat totals. Though proportional representation would clearly be in the self-interest of the Lib Dems, it’s become a national concern since Labour won a parliamentary majority in 2005 (55% of seats) with the lowest-ever share of the popular vote (35%). All the parties now favor some form of substantive election reform.
Now that Labour sees its fortunes fading in the polls, Gordon Brown has reached out to Nick Clegg about forming a coalition government if Labour is unable to secure a majority of seats in parliament, which seems increasingly likely. Many pundits have assumed the Lib-Labour merger to be all but inevitable, due to clear ideological overlap. But yesterday Nick Clegg rebuffed the Labour offer, and had some unusually harsh words for Gordon Brown’s leadership and integrity:
He said: "Brown systematically blocked, and personally blocked, political reform. I think he is a desperate politician and I just do not believe him." He added: "And do I think Labour delivered fairness? No. Do I think the Labour Party in its heart has a faith in civil liberties? No. Do I think they’ve delivered political reform? No. They are clutching at straws."
Desperate? Not believable? No faith in civil liberties? Ouch. It seems impossible for Clegg to walk this back and enter into a government with Gordon Brown remaining on as Prime Minister.
At the Spectator, Alex Massie notes that in addition to Clegg’s denunciation of Brown, a Lib-Labour coalition is unlikely due to the Lib Dems’ emphasis on the primacy of the popular vote. It essentially makes it very hard for them to do deals with any party that hasn’t won a popular mandate:
The Liberal Democrats have based their campaign for proportional representation on the grounds that it is unfair that, as they did in 2005, you could win 22% of the votes cast but only 9% of the parliamentary seats. There is some merit to this argument too.
But it would be grossly undermined if the Lib Dems were to do a deal with a Labour party that, say, had 42% of the seats on 27% of the vote. Indeed, the logic of long-standing Liberal Democrat positions is that the party should look to deal with the winners of the popular vote, not the one that has accrued the most seats due to the vagaries and absurdities of the electoral system.
For this reason he sees it more likely that the Liberal Democrats will choose to align with the Conservatives, if indeed the Conservatives eke out a popular vote victory. He notes that the two parties have plenty of potential common ground to work from. Things get interesting if the Liberal Democrats win a clear popular vote mandate, yet come in third in proportion of seats.
There are two more televised debates, so there’s still time for Nick Clegg to morph in one of our greatest third-partyish candidates in recent memory, wack-job Mike Gravel. Power to the People!
In his column today, David Brooks analyzes a new study which looks at whether the internet is fostering more or less ideological segregation among online news consumers. Since it’s so easy to self-filter information, are we becoming increasingly isolated in our own ideological cocoons, only seeking out items that confirm our biases, and ignoring anything that challenges them? Here’s Brooks:
The methodology is complicated, but can be summarized through a geographic metaphor. Think of the Fox News site as Casper, Wyo. If you visited and shook hands with the people reading the site, you’d be very likely to be shaking hands with a conservative. The New York Times site, they suggest, is like Manhattan. If you shook hands with other readers, you’d probably be shaking hands with liberals.
The study measures the people who visit sites, not the content inside.
The study ends up finding no real segregation going on. Yes, shocker, conservatives are more likely to visit conservative sites, but a frequenter of GlennBeck.com is also more likely than the average person to visit NYTimes.com. And active liberal consumers are more likely than the average person to visit FoxNews.com.
And though the study didn’t analyze the content inside, the content inside matters! I admittedly do not visit the Fox News website very often, and if I catch part of an episode of Glenn Beck once in a while, I experience it with the same bemusement as when I watch exotic animals at the zoo. I think the content there sucks; not because I disagree with it, but because it sucks. I do have a strict filter for my consumption of conservative news and commentary. That’s why I read David Frum, Bruce Bartlett, Conor Friedersdorf, Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, and libertarians like Will Wilkinson, Julian Sanchez, Megan McArdle, and Tyler Cowen. I don’t consider avoiding Fox News and Glenn Beck to be evidence of disengagement from conservative viewpoints.
I also question whether there is really an informational equivalence between Fox News and NYTimes.com, as Brooks, and the study, seem to suggest. It’s admittedly really hard to filter out my own biases here, but c’mon, after scanning the NYT website for an hour, does a conservative really feel beseiged by liberal spin and Democrat propaganda? Right now, above the fold on the Times site I see a volcano story, a Goldman Sachs story, a story on the latest Supreme Court ruling, as well as a story on refurbished paintings at the Met, a movie review by A.O. Scott, and a profile of Demi Moore. This is liberal slant only in the conservative mad-lib sense that movies and actresses are from Hollywood and Hollywood is librul; art is urban and effete and therefore librul; the Supreme Court making decisions on stuff is activist and activist judges are librul. Maybe even volcanos (volcanos are part of the environment and all environmental stuff is librul). It’s a fun game.
The point here is that exposing oneself to different ideological viewpoints is not the same thing as thoughtfully considering those viewpoints, or allowing them to genuinely challenge one’s predisposed biases and opinions.
Julian Sanchez has been writing a lot lately about the trend in the contemporary conservative movement toward what he terms "epistemic closure":
Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)
So it’s not that conservatives aren’t running into ideas that conflict with their reality (as the study shows), but rather their epistemic closure allows them to avoid the hard work of actually reconciling and grappling with those conflicts.
In a fascinating follow-up post, Julian thinks about why this is happening. He writes about the recent story of a lesbian teen in Fulton, Mississippi who had to sue the town in order to be allowed to attend her prom with her girlfriend. The girl, Constance McMillen, won the suit, but in response, the parents of the town organized a seperate prom to which she was not invited. The "real" prom was only attended by Constance and a few of her friends. The story went national when media giant Perez Hilton denounced the town and its homophobic students on his website. Becausue of Hilton’s link, a Facebook page set up by the students to ridicule the poor girl was suddenly invaded by the digital hordes, all expressing their support for Constance and heaping scorn on her retrograde bullies and oppressors. The number of "outsider" visitors quickly dwarfed the size of the original membership. Julian writes:
Contemplate how vertigo-inducing this must be. You’ve got a local community where a certain set of cultural norms is so dominant that it’s just seen as obvious and natural that a lesbian wouldn’t have an equal right to participate in prom—to the point where the overt hostility isn’t really directed at Constance’s sexuality so much as her bewildering insistence on messing with the way everyone knows things are supposed to be. They’re not attuned to the injustice because it seems like almost a fact of nature. Except they’re now flooded with undeniable evidence that a hell of a lot of people don’t see things that way, and even hold their community in contempt for seeing things that way.
So Julian sees this ideological closure in part as "an attempt to compensate for the collapse of geographic closure"—like that experienced by the poor fools of Fulton, Mississippi when their town was digitally invaded by Perez Hilton’s worldwide readership.
Former Reagan advisor and George H.W Bush official Bruce Bartlett has also weighed in on the conservative "epistemic closure" debate. He recounts a story from 2004 in which a piece ran in the New York Times Magazine quoting Bartlett as being highly critical of the current Bush White House:
A few days after the article appeared I was at some big conservative event in Washington. I assumed that my conservative friends would give me a lot of crap for what I said. But in fact no one said anything to me–and not in that embarrassed/averting-one’s-eyes sort of way. They appeared to know nothing about it.
After about half an hour I decided to start asking people what they thought of the article. Every single one gave me the same identical answer: I don’t read the New York Times. Moreover, the answers were all delivered in a tone that suggested I was either stupid for asking or that I thought they were stupid for thinking they read the Times. […]
This was the first time I really understood what is now being called epistemic closure. In the years since, it appears to have gotten much worse.
I tend to agree.
Just want to pass along these absolutely amazing photographs of the volcano in Iceland, from the Boston Globe’s Big Picture: Part 1, and Part 2.
After looking at the photos I couldn’t help thinking once again of the absurdity of lines like this:
Genesis 1.28: And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
I don’t think this subduing business is going quite as planned.
Qur’an 31.20: Do you not see that God has subjected to your use all things in the heavens and on earth, and has made His bounties flow to you in exceeding measure, both seen and unseen?
Oh the bounties are flowing in exceeding measure all right.
Incidentally, my favorite argument against these “dominion” lines is yes, we have “dominion over every living thing that moves upon earth”—everything except for microbes and pathogens and microorganisms, which have always asserted, and continue to assert their dominion over us, and which the authors of these texts for some reason failed to mention. A very costly omission.
I love learning about the literary habits of famous writers, and so I was delighted to see this story in the Times about Mark Twain’s personal library. It’s just been opened to fans in honor of the centennial of Twain’s death. We learn that in hundreds of his books, he filled the margins with handwritten notes, corrections, and commentary. As a reader he was part grammar freak, part editor, part critic:
[The books] are filled with notes in his own cramped, scratchy handwriting. Irrepressible when he spotted something he did not like, but also impatient with good books that he thought could be better, he was often savage in his commentary. […]
Badly written books bore the brunt of his annotations, Mr. Mac Donnell said, but the author "would also correct a book if he thought it was a gem.’"
It reminds me of John Adams, whose vast personal library I saw on display at the Boston Public Library a few years ago. Adams filled his book margins with thousands upon thousands of words of critical commentary, personal reflections, asides, and argumentation. He’d often address his annotations directly to the author, in the second person, as if they were sitting across the table from each other. He’d propose questions and ask for clarification as if he was expecting a response. Sometimes his commentary on a book was longer than the book itself. It was pretty extraordinary to see.
Reading wasn’t a passive pleasure or an act of leisure for these guys. It was a cross-generational, cross-spatial communion with the author; a means to defy time and memory; a staving off of lonliness, oblivion, social anxiety; most of all, it was a method of engaging and enlarging the ideas and arguments and intellectual passions of their day.
In the sidebar you’ll notice that I’m reading Isaac Deutscher’s wonderful biography of Trotsky. Trotsky is well known as an orator and a revolutionary agitator, but he was foremost a writer. What I notice in all of these men is a true clinical compulsion in their relationship with the written word. They simply can’t not write. Trotsky was a serious offender. He of course had a prodigious political and philosophical output, but he was just as prolific in his non-political writing. Long train journey? Write a discriptive essay about the landscape. Banished to a Siberian work camp? Make a study of the indigenous peoples you run into along the way. Stuck in a Petrograd prison for a few nights? Find a pen and write a piece about the prison conditions and the judicial process. Exiled in some European city? Go to the museums and write long incisive comparative art essays. Stuck anywhere for longer than 5 minutes? Write a letter. Write three letters.
Doing the bulk of our reading and writing on a computer screen certainly allows for a large degree of immediate interactivity. And I don’t have a Kindle yet but I can see what an amazing travel companion it would make. And I know that it’s almost always wrongheaded to bemoan the process by which new techology displaces or complements old technology (and that’s the best way to view the printing press: old technology). But it’s hard not to feel a little bit sad at the realization that there won’t be many more readers like Twain and John Adams. Sure I can annotate and engage and debate to my heart’s content on the blog, but a hyperlink-filled post isn’t as redolent of time and place as a book jacket or a hand-scrawled margin, and doesn’t carry with it the associative memories of books-as-objects. There’s a sense appeal to whatever device or object you’re engaging with, but print-on- bound-paper has unique sensory characteristics which leads to a unique intellectual and emotive experience, and I think it’s ok to say that you uniquely favor it.
The other day I wrote about what I called the "tyranny of the dead" in its domestic context, as it relates to things like judicial interpretation, Founder worship, and Confederate revisionism. It’s "the way in which we summon and resurrect our ancestors to do our work for us, and in turn, we willfully acquiesce to their coercion." I quoted Thomas Jefferson: "The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead; and the dead have neither powers nor rights over it."
In his New York Times column today, Roger Cohen picks up on this exact theme, and applies it to areas of international conflict. He writes:
It comes down to this in the end — the minority of the living, a mere 6.7 billion people on a fragile planet, and the majority of the dead, numberless and stretching back over an expanse vaster than the iciest steppe. Do you choose the minority or the majority? For whose account do you labor?
Those may seem strange questions. But a clear demarcation line separates regions able to look forward, even over history’s wounds, and those unable to escape the clutches of the dead.
Just as Neo-Confederate romanticists and Tea Party members have an illusory vision of traditional American identity, Roger writes that so too, from the Balkans to the Middle East, "lives and landscape [are] devastated by the abuse of memory."
Anyway, a good reminder that in modern America we reconcile and expiate the complexities and sins of our ancestors in a peaceful, if often unsettling, way. But abroad, "a past of perceived persecution and loss" has led to unfathomable body counts. Which means more tyrants from the grave, more crimes to avenge, more blurring of the line between Cohen’s majority and minority.
It is a good metaphor for nationalist war: it is undertaken by neither the living nor the dead. The perpetrators are led along as if in a trance, the hands of the dead break through the ground beneath them and propel them forward from the ankles, step by step, like sepulchral puppeteers…
Yesterday I talked about the dangers of ideological purity when interpreting the law, and how it can lead to the forced cohesion of seemingly irreconcilable legal preferences. That same forced cohesion is also seen in the dynamics of modern political parties.
Why for instance, if I am a Republican in 2010, am I expected to be at once pro-free trade, anti-abortion, disbelieving in climate change, supportive of an invasive national security state, pro-drilling for oil, anti-gay marriage, pro-nuclear weapons, pro-nuclear power, anti-redistribution of wealth at home, pro-nation building abroad.
And if I am a modern Democrat, my political platform is basically the exact opposite. (Give or take: Obama has jumbled the configurations around a little, which happens surprisingly often.)
Some of these positions can, with some work, be wedged into various coherent ideological frameworks (some have historical precedent, and others fit if you account for the prominence or absense of Evangelical Christians in your party), yet many of them just cannot. There’s no clear or ineluctable reason why they have been bundled together as they have.
Yet sure enough, when a new issue hits the public consciousness, an issue in which I am incapable of seeing an ideological angle, it takes about a half hour for full partisan battle lines to be drawn, talking points to be distributed, and polarization to begin.
How does this happen? How does an issue that seems so thoroughly non-ideological and non-partisan end up with one party setting it as a central plank of their platform, and the other party rabidly opposed to it? Why is it controversial in the least to have a government policy that aims to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the amount of fissile material in the world? The more fissile material there is, the likelier we will all die from it. Likewise, climate change, and environmental sustainability in general: the warmer and more generally gummed up the earth becomes, the sooner we will all die because of it. I always thought, in what is really the foundational principle of civilization itself, that we had all tacitly agreed with each other that we don’t want to die if we don’t have to.
I know it’s a bit naive to be shocked, shocked! that there’s politics going on in politics. And if you squint hard enough and stare long enough, the most anodyne issue can be framed and construed as a partisan imperative. But…
I really think the process by which many issues become attached to each political party is no more sophisticated than how balls are distributed at the beginning of a dodgeball game:
All the balls are in the middle, and when the whistle blows everyone runs up and grabs one. There, that’s your ball. You run with it. You own it. You defend it vigorously, and then use it to undermine the success of the other team by literally bashing them in the face with it.
If you look at all the dodgeballs that your team is in possession of at any one time, there’s no use looking for patterns that identify them as uniquely fit just for your side for all time. The balls don’t have anything in common other than the fact that they’re yours.
Clearly party differentiation is not a new thing. It’s useful to distinguish yourself from your political opponents as much as possible. Just as it’s pretty unhelpful to your side if you keep saying, "Well, they’ve got another great point there." But I think political leaders choose policy positions to a much larger degree than we think by just cynically picking the opposite of whatever the other party choses. The leaders are in on the ruse, but by the time it reaches the masses as a prominent talking point, and framed as an essential tenet of the party platform, it becomes dogma. It becomes yours. And the fact that the other side is arguing the opposite makes you dig in. The differentiation becomes bitterly and needlessly ideological. Constituencies arise and rally around the issue, and they become very hard to dislodge.
But not impossible. In dodgeball, the more time that goes by, the more balls that were originally yours will get lobbed back over to your side again. Same in politics: think about support for Medicare, the prudence of American empire, the importance of individual civil liberties. Plenty of others. To know where the parties stand you’d first need to know which decade you’re talking about.
I read somewhere that the very first mental calculation we make when we meet a new person is, "Are they one of us, or one of them?" It’s instantaneous. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ can refer to any number of group affiliations we might have: ethnicity, religion, education level, socioeconomic class, sports team affiliation, and of course, political identification. But after a while, it hardly matters what originally binded ‘us’ together, and what binds ‘them’ together, they who we oppose so aggressively. It reminds one of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and the bitter rivalry between the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. Or in South Park terms, the Unified Atheist League (UAL) verses the United Atheist Alliance (UAA).
I guess in psychology this is the narcissism of small differences mixed in with in-group/out-group identification, plus some status-quo bias and confirmation bias thrown in.
The political tribalism that this leads to is often harmless, but when seemingly non-partisan issues get elevated to something like a religious edict, at best it’s a serious impediment to solving problems, and at worst it’s a very destructive and insidious force in our civil society.
I was talking with a friend last night about the Supreme Court vacancy, and as we started discussing the case history and the ideological leanings of the various short-listers, we soon realized we were getting all jumbled up trying to discern which were “conservative” and which were “liberal”. No deference for executive power, but bad on commerce clause wankery? National security apologist but a seeming comfort with striking down congressional legislation? The parlor game of trying to decide if Stevens drifted left over the years or the Court drifted right? What does it matter? Why do we insist on assigning ideological coherence to any of these grab-bag combinations? Why are we so attracted to the forced cohesion of seemingly irreconcilable policy preferences?
Anyway, we both realized that we very much like the idea of a Justice who has substantial political or professional experience, rather than someone who’s been a federal judge for twenty-five years.
Oliver Wendel Holmes said that the life of the law has not been logic, but experience. But the problem is that the life of the career judge has not been informed by experience, but by logic. Such a life would seem to inevitably lead to an ossification of thought and the erection of a fortified ideological prism through which all issues and controversies must first be squeezed through. As noted above, the problem is there is no one mental filter that can make a coherent whole out of the myriad of infinitely complex and disparate legal and political issues before us today.
I want somebody who knows what it’s like to have been responsive to the ebbs and flows of public passion, and who has been judged in that arena not by their fealty to an esoteric process of rationality, but by actual produced results for actual living breathing constituents.
Now the question is who would we have decide for us which results are prudent and which are to be avoided? Is the imposition of results the proper role of an unelected lifetime judicial appointee? It’s a difficult question, and the answer is sometimes yes, often no. People who consider themselves originalists or constructionists (again the prisms strangle our discourse and suffocate us all) would bristle at my “sometimes yes”. I’m quite aware that this sort of language is code these days for the dreaded, democracy-destroying “judicial activism”. But as Benjamin Cardozo said in 1921, he was not worried about whether a judge should take “some consideration of the social welfare, by my own or common standards of justice and morals” because, “I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.” Judges have expansive legislative power, and spending your time denying that fact, rather than working to see that power wielded prudently, is to be ensnared in an arcane logic game at the expense of consideration for the well-being of actual people. That was a little inartful: I don’t mean to call it callous or immoral, or to say that strict constructionists are apathetic about the well-being of actual people. I just side with the Holmes view that says the law breathes only when we see it set to work, not merely when it appears to comport with a certain “approach” or process of thought while we’re staring at it on a piece of paper.
This veneration of intellectual process at the expense of lived experience got me thinking about Founder worship, and worship of the documents the Founders produced. It’s is a strange thing. The subject always brings to my mind a quote from Thomas Jefferson, writing to James Madison in 1789, “The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead; and the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” He was talking about the extent to which one generation should be able to bind another to their habits, laws, or morals, and Jefferson took the view that this coercion from the grave was very dangerous. He actually thought the ability of future generations to repeal laws was not sufficient protection from this tyranny of the dead, and he instead wanted laws to have limited duration and expire after a certain period of time. That’s a rather unworkable view, no doubt, but it speaks to the way in which we summon and resurrect our ancestors to do our work for us, and in turn, we willfully acquiesce to their coercion.
Yesterday Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a wonderful essay on Confederate Lost-Causers who seem to appropriate their dead ancestors to give color and direction to the present. Though it’s a different topic, I think it has resonance in things like how we interpret the law, the instinct behind Founder worship, and why a demand for ideological purity inexorably leads to intellectual ossification. Ta-Nehisi writes that, “It’s weak to manipulate the dead in order to reconcile our present, to force men to play our Gods”:
The Lost Cause is necromancy–it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn’t about “honoring” the past–it’s about an inability to cope with the present.
It denies their humanity by eliding their faults, by recreating and re-molding them each time we resurrect them anew, in order to “do the work that I would shy away from.” And as we enslave them to our present needs, so too are we enslaved by them: you cannot create gods out of the memory of men and then be surprised to find yourself under the thumb of their dictates.
In law just as in historical revisionism, we ought to more often eschew seance with the dead, and instead, take a step out of our houses which we know so well. As Rilke said, “Enormous space is near….”
One good sign that you are following way too much political news is that you find yourself in the habit of practicing political spin just for kicks. Like when I read a damaging headline or an indefensible quote from a politician, I’ll sometimes try and think of the most absurd, sophistic spin or backtrack, picturing as my archetype, I don’t know, Sarah Palin I guess.
Anyway, just a minute ago I saw a headline that read, "Americans dominate worst-built cars ranking." And the first thing I thought was, "Yeah, that’s because Americans dominate EVERYTHING!"
Not a good sign…
