Author Archive for Jason Dobbins

There are plenty of reasons of morality and justice for Americans to hope for the swift demise of the Syrian regime, and for its smug, chinless leader to be escorted to the dock, followed by a lifelong retirement in prison.

But virtues and values notwithstanding, it’s national interests that all the realist kids want to hear about these days. So let’s talk interests.

The main U.S. strategic interest in the ongoing Syrian uprising is Syria’s star role in the regional “Resistance Bloc” consisting also of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. What are they “resisting?” Well they would say they’re resisting the big bad U.S-Israeli axis of imperialism; colloquially known as the Great Satan and the Little Satan. Of all their resistance activities, none is undertaken with as much ardor as their often violent, mostly rhetorical opposition to the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

That the regimes in Iran and Syria maintain their power only through coercive repression always left it an open question as to exactly in whose name they were “resisting”. They have a very old game of deflecting blame for all domestic ills on hidden foreign plots and conspiracies, and they claim legitimacy by arguing that they alone can win justice for Palestinians and dignity for Muslims.

With the Arab Spring in late bloom, it has been interesting to see if and how the resistance bloc coalition might fray, as its members are forced to choose between support for regimes or for the people demanding the end of the regimes. Any result that weakens this coalition would be a tremendous boon to U.S. interests in the region.

This choice is particularly acute for Hamas and Hezbollah. Both are grassroots movements with mass popular support and experience in coalition government. They are far more attuned to their respective local constituencies, and are credible because they are seen as taking seriously the importance of democratic legitimacy and accountability. But with their main arms and cash conduit in Damascus under threat of being toppled, who will they stand with?

Hamas, whose senior leadership is based in Damascus, is nothing if not politically astute, and has calculated (correctly) that it better not be caught clinging to its erstwhile sponsor at the expense of the very people on whose behalf it claims to be “resisting.”

Haaretz has learned that Hamas has made a decision to abandon Damascus without letting the Syrian authorities know. The decision was made by the organization’s senior leadership in the wake of the harsh criticism voiced against top Hamas officials in Gaza and abroad because of their ties with the Syrian regime. […]

The Arab League’s decision to suspend Syria from membership of the organization and impose economic sanctions on Damascus tipped the scales, with Hamas finally deciding to covertly evacuate all its activists from Syria and leave behind only the organization’s highest-ranking officials so as to preserve a low profile of activity there.

Iran, which hasn’t wavered in its support for Assad, is not happy with Hamas’ abandonment of Damascus:

Iran had applied intense pressure to Hamas in an effort to persuade it not to leave Damascus, threatening even to cut off funds to the organization if it did so, Palestinian sources have told Haaretz.

The Iranian pressure also included an unprecedented ultimatum – namely, an explicit threat to stop supplying Hamas with arms and suspend the training of its military activists.

And how about Hezbollah? For now Hezbollah seems to have chosen to stick with old team. Regarding Assad, Hezbollah chief Hasan Nasrallah told a large crowd in Beirut that he would “stand by a regime that has stood by the resistance for a long time.”

His invocation of Syria’s support for “the resistance” sounds a little discordant when the “resistance” most people think of today is that which is bravely battling and dying out on the streets against the Assad regime.

Understandably, the opposition forces in Syria are not happy with the prospect of anyone taking the side of the regime, and they have warned the old resistance bloc superfriends that they are watching closely:

Burhan Ghalioun, the chairman of the Syrian National Council, told CNN in an interview airing Tuesday that Iran is “participating in suppressing the Syrian people” by backing al-Assad. […]

“I hope that Iranians realize the importance of not compromising the Syrian-Iranian relationship by defending a regime whose own people clearly reject it and has become a regime of torture to its own people,” Ghalioun said. Tehran must understand “that this is the last chance to avoid an unwanted fate to the Syrian-Iranian relationship,” he said.

As for Hezbollah…Ghalioun said, “The Syrian people stood completely by Hezbollah once. But today, they are surprised that Hezbollah did not return the favor and support the Syrian’s people struggle for freedom.”

You notice the chairman is not exactly burning bridges here. This is for the unsettling but banal reason that most Syrians, including opposition members, strongly dislike Israel, are deeply distrustful of the U.S., and agree broadly with the military and political goals of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. It’s likely that a more representative government in Damascus would not be any more amenable to coexistence with Israel than Assad is.

The Syrian National Council is basically offering to keep the old resistance bloc intact, if only they all agree to disavow Assad. Hamas is on board. I don’t know why Iran and Hezbollah don’t take the deal, unless they are so sure that Assad will survive this.

But from a U.S. perspective, this in-fighting is great. It will be a fine day if and when Assad finally tumbles, but it will be extra special if a new government is seated that feels scorned by the old alliances and distrustful of the motives of Iran. Disrupting this four-headed supply chain of reactionary hate and violence would be a major strategic victory for the United States and reform-minded allies in the region.

UPDATE: Forget my assessment on what the Syrian opposition thinks of Iran and Hezbollah. Instead, read this interview with the head of the Syrian opposition, Burhan Ghalioun (quoted above), transcript here. It seems I misrepresented his position.

On Iran:

The current relationship between Syria and Iran is abnormal. It is unprecedented in Syria’s foreign policy history. [...]

Our relations with Iran will be revisited as any of the countries in the region, based on the exchange of economic and diplomatic interests, in the context of improving stability in the region and not that of a special relationship. There will be no special relationship with Iran.

This is the core issue—the military alliance. Breaking the exceptional relationship means breaking the strategic military alliance. We do not mind economic relations.

On Hezbollah:

As our relations with Iran change, so too will our relationship with Hezbollah. Hezbollah after the fall of the Syrian regime will not be the same. Lebanon should not be used as it was used in the Assad era as an arena to settle political scores.

How much of these positions actually make their way into a new post-Assad representative government remains to be seen. But wow, these are truly transformative policies; let’s hope he speaks for many, many of his countrymen.

This article on President Obama’s failure at managing the U.S.-Pakistani relationship by Kapil Komireddi was recommended and endorsed by David Frum, so I gave it a close read, and I was surprised to find it consisting of mostly hysterical ad hominem bunk. The central conceit seems to be that the Obama administration is omnipotent, yet instead of using this omnipotence to help usher in a strong civilian democratic rule in Pakistan, Obama insists on using it to cosign Pakistan’s backslide into military authoritarianism. The failure of all former U.S. presidents to meaningfully change the balance of power between militarists and civilians in Pakistan is not mentioned in the piece.

Komireddi spends half of his piece blaming Obama for the recent forced resignation of Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani. It is true that Haqqani was a great champion of civilian democratic rule in Pakistan, and during his time in Washington he was often the only bright spot surrounding the fraught U.S.-Pakistani relationship. I’m sure the generals hated him. But unfortunately he was not the vanguard of some imminent Pakistani Spring in which the liberal secular pro-Western democrats would assert themselves and ride the army and the ISI and the Islamists out of town once and for all.

That’s because for all his personal and professional attributes, Haqqani as ambassador didn’t mean that Pakistan had civilian rule. As even Komireddi tellingly admits, "[Haqqani's] forced resignation puts an end to the pretence of civilian rule in Pakistan." (italics mine) It was pretense, and it’s always been pretense. The generals were always in charge. This is tragic and lamentable but it’s not Barack Obama’s fault.

Komireddi accuses the U.S. of marginalizing Haqqani due to his outspoken support for civilian rule and for curbing the influence of the military.

Why would the White House choose to belittle a man championing civilian rule in Pakistan? Isn’t that also the objective of the Obama administration? The answer increasingly appears to be no.

Nonsense. The U.S. loves Haqqani’s peaceful democratic vision for Pakistan, but because that vision does not accurately reflect all parts of the government he was supposed to represent, his effectiveness as ambassador was somewhat attenuated. It would be a lovely world in which Husain Haqqani was in charge of civilian and military policy in Pakistan. But it’s not our world, and it’s no help for the U.S. to pretend that he actually had the ear and the confidence of the true power-brokers in Pakistan.

Komireddi undermines his own thesis about Obama’s unique role in emboldening Pakistani perfidy when he diagnoses the real source of Pakistan’s problems, which, shockingly, predate Barack Obama’s presidency:

Since the 1950s, when Gen. Ayub Khan mounted the first military coup, Pakistan’s army has etiolated the country’s evolution in every imaginable sense. Rooted in a culture of grievance and malevolence that is the foundational basis of Pakistan, the army has waged wars against India, suffused young minds with a fervor for jihad, sponsored terrorism, spread xenophobia and racism, carried out genocide against millions of its own citizens, stolen and smuggled nuclear secrets, foisted the vile Taliban regime upon the defenseless people of Afghanistan, and assumed complete ownership of Pakistan.

Those sound like really tough problems! Yet, Komireddi thinks that these sixty years of entrenched military rule buttressed by Islamic extremism, nuclear promiscuity, and terrorism sponsorship; in fact a military rule so entrenched as to be said without exaggeration to have "assumed complete ownership of Pakistan," could have been undone by a U.S. president throwing his rhetorical support behind a particularly talented and sympathetic Pakistani ambassador! Boy we really missed an opportunity there! 

Well to be fair, he has other ideas for how President Obama could have won the day if he wasn’t so willfully in cahoots with Pakistan’s military. He could have "corraled the army with fresh ultimatums" following the embarassing revelation that Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in Abbottabad. Komireddi does not mention that in the wake of the bin Laden operation the U.S. withheld almost $1 billion in military aid to Pakistan. Yet the relationship has only deteriorated further since then. I don’t know how Komireddi is so sure that more and stronger U.S. ultimatums would miraculously produce a more compliant Pakistani military, and one that suddenly stops caring about hating India or wanting control over Afghanistan. Komireddi’s ideas come straight from the toughness-seriousness-boldness school of intractable problem solving. 

Nonetheless, he is certainly right that the Pakistani military and ISI’s double-dealing with the Taliban and complicity in violence against Americans in Afghanistan is scandalous. As to the former, Pakistan has seen a strategic interest in supporting the Afghan Taliban for a long time. Not even ten years of war has changed this calculus. Ten more years won’t either. At least the killing of American troops will be mitigated by the upcoming drawdown. But that is bad news according to Komireddi:

Then, in a craven abdication of American responsibility to the citizens of Afghanistan, Obama talked about the need for nation-building at home. […]

As the fighters currently enjoying Pakistani hospitality in the country’s northwest make their way back into Afghanistan [following the U.S. withdrawal], the gains made over the last decade will wither away. Thus will the tremendous sacrifices, of both American troops and Afghan civilians, be honored.

Ah yes, the only way to honor sacrifice is with unending sacrifice. That’s a tidy aphorism but a really terrible basis for military strategy, and an immoral one. One may disagree with the administration’s decision to bring the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan to a close after ten years. But I’m curious: what would acquit Obama of the charge of craven irresponsibility? Another troop surge? Another trillion dollars? Escalating the current nebulous proxy war with Pakistan into a real war? If your principles of justice and sacrifice require you to advocate embroiling America in a hot war with an major Asian nuclear power, you need new principles.

Are there things the U.S. could do to help foster a less military-centric ruling order in Pakistan? I don’t know, I’m sure there’s something. But in the post-9/11 period, two successive administrations, with opposite foreign policy visions and opposite rhetorical styles, have been unable to do so. I find it very likely that a long string of future administrations will encounter the same difficulty. Then, as now, it will not be Barack Obama’s fault.

Say it with me Mr. Komireddi, slowly and tearfully, Good Will Hunting style: it’s not Barack Obama’s fault.

I rewatched the brilliant and hilarious political satire In the Loop last night, in which midlevel officials in the US and UK governments stumble fecklessly toward war with an unspecified Middle Eastern country. This time around it reminded me of the current farce surrounding the ever elusive, ever imminent, ever "on the table" Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Will they or won’t they?

Like our fumbling minister above, I’ve been seeing the same sort of equivocation regarding Iran in the media for several years now, ramped up to eleven ever since Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic cover story last year in which he concluded that there was a "better than 50 percent chance" of an Israeli attack by this past July. We’ve missed that deadline of course, but the speculation, the recrimination, the preparation, rages on.

A new IAEA report accuses Iran of having carried out secret tests "relevant to the development of a nuclear device." In response, the US, UK, and Canada have announced new sanctions targeting Iran’s banking and oil sectors. This week Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak hinted that the time for climbing the mountain of conflict may be approaching:

Barak, speaking on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS program, indicated that Israel’s patience was wearing thin — and provided an ominous response when asked about the growing speculation of an Israeli military strike.

"I don’t think that that is a subject for public discussion," he said. "But I can tell you that the IAEA report has a sobering impact on many in the world, leaders as well as the publics, and people understand that the time has come."

Even before this latest IAEA report, Israel has been in serious preparation and training for an unspecified long-distance air conflict:

In late October, six Israeli Air Force squadrons sent aircraft 1,500 miles across the Mediterranean for a joint exercise over Sardinia with the Italian and German air forces. This is just one of over a dozen such exercises that have taken place in the last three years, in which Israeli pilots have trained in flying long distances over unknown terrain and facing fighter pilots and anti-aircraft batteries of foreign forces.

The U.S. official position on an Israeli attack seems to be deep ambivalence. It does seem clear that the U.S. does not want the Israelis to act unilaterally. Unlike previous Israeli attacks on nuclear facilities in Iraq (1981) and Syria (2007), the geopolitical stakes with Iran are much higher, and retaliation—economic or military or both—is inevitable. The U.S. will share public blame for any Israeli action whether it was involved or not, and it would not be difficult for Iran to target U.S. personnel and interests in the region if it so chose.

With all the conspicuous preparation underway, it’s no surprise that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Israel last month to urge closer coordination:

Panetta publicly stressed during his visit that the United States is “very concerned” about the Iranian threat but emphasized that countering that threat “depends on the countries working together.” Panetta demanded that Jerusalem warn Washington in advance of an attack on Iran, but he did not receive clear assurances it would, according to American diplomatic sources.

Panetta also warned of the potential economic fallout of a military strike. "There are going to be economic consequences to that (an Iran strike), that could impact not just on our economy but the world economy," he said. He said the U.S. focus was on diplomatic pressure and sanctions.

I hope that is true. Panetta’s palpable public opposition to a strike hopefully means that the administration’s private opposition is even more forceful. One sign that there might be more bluster than substance here is that this debate has always seemed a little too public. Israel doesn’t take to broadcasting its military intentions prior to action. There were no public threats or preparations before the Osirak reactor strike in Iraq, nor the Syria strike in 2007. They just happened. When the real business of sensitive national security needs to be done, Israel doesn’t put its defense minister on CNN to announce it first. When everybody shuts the hell up, it’ll be time to worry.

Speaking of not shutting up, I’ll leave you with more from In the Loop—behold the great Malcolm Tucker (extremely NSFW):

The rise of modern Republicanism as a Christianist cultural-resentment club has corresponded nicely with the hibernation of true conservatism. As a quaint historical artifact, here is something close to the essense of true conservatism; the parable of G.K. Chesterton’s fence:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

Now, here is Rick Perry, on reforming institutions:

“I don’t believe that Washington needs a new coat of paint — I think the whole place needs to be overhauled,” Mr. Perry said, speaking to applause from more than 100 people on the floor of the Schebler manufacturing plant here. “I’m a true believer that we need to uproot, tear down and rebuild Washington, D.C., and our federal institutions.” […]

“Americans know there is a season for everything under the sun,” Mr. Perry said. “And this is the season for tearing down and rebuilding again, for uprooting the broken branches of government in Washington, and building a new government that’s smaller and more humble.”

We’ll ignore for now the rather pagan-tinged assertion about seasons and suns. Perry also wants to turn Congress into a part-time legislature, as well as term-limit all federal judges; all part of his modest proposal to uproot, tear down, and rebuild our entire system of government. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more radical platform from a legitimate presidential candidate. I do not consider myself a conservative, but even I am terrified at the insouciance with which Perry aims to remake the world. So much for the Republican fear of policy “uncertainty”!

Perry’s plan to abolish whole executive departments is another example. He famously could not recall his full list of intended targets, but that is most likely because he has no idea what those departments do. You can better understand this behavior when you realize that Rick Perry and his ilk do not have considered policy proposals, they have only moods.

When you declare yourself a “true believer” in the rectitude of your own conclusions, analysis and doubt are the enemy. A man with such a temperament simply reaches for the sledgehammer without wondering what happens after he swings. This, I remind you by way of Chesterton, is not a conservative impulse. It’s a frightening mix of utopianism and nihilism; we need a good word for it.

Republicans are not too enthralled at the prospect of a Mitt Romney White House. While his polling has been remarkably consistent, and his fundraising and organizational strength far ahead of his rivals, he can’t seem to crack 25% in the polls. He’ll still win the nomination, but it seems it will be bestowed grudgingly.

What’s the problem? Well, we are told that it’s his lack of demonstrated fealty to “true” conservative principles. And the flip-flopping of course. Here is Erick Erickson, Republican gatekeeper:

Mitt Romney is not the George W. Bush of 2012 — he is the Harriet Miers of 2012, only conservative because a few conservative grand pooh-bahs tell us Mitt Romney is conservative and for no other reason. […]

Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. And his general election campaign will be an utter disaster for conservatives as he takes the GOP down with him and burns up what it means to be a conservative in the process.

Erickson, truly the Edmund Burke of our time in his ability to ascertain “what it means to be a conservative,” is so distraught that he’s giving lowly Jon Huntsman another look, who he thinks might be “more faithful in his conservative convictions than Mitt Romney.”

I don’t understand all this unease and this obsession with divining convictions. It’s true, here we have a guy who caters and tailors his views to match whichever constituency he is courting at the time. We all know about his moderate technocrat phase in Massachusetts, and his subsequent repudiation of that phase and his slow rightward march as he looked to national office.

The important thing to note here is that as regards “what it means to be a conservative,” it’s not Romney who flits in and out of that immutable state, it’s the conservative elites that keep changing the damn definition. It’s not Romney who’s unmoored, it’s the Republican overlords, who code policy positions as variously canonical or heretical, depending on what the Democrats are doing.

Reagan raised taxes, George W. Bush spoke compassionately about immigration, conservatives innovated the idea of the individual mandate. Now the Repubican mood is such that one dollar of extra revenue is too much, anything short of a sci-fi border death fence is amnesty, and healthcare for all is synonymous with fascism. I’m sure there are other examples. It’s true that Romney has floated rather promiscuously around many sides of these and other issues, but a big reason for that is the “true conservative” position is a perennially moving target.

If I was a Republican kingmaker like Erickson, I’d think: “Well who knows what previously verboten notion will become the new conservative dogma in a few years from now; and who can tell which bedrock conservative belief we will have to abandon because Barney Frank decides to embrace it? Who can we trust to be willing to flop every time we impetuously decide to flip?” Under the circumstances, a consistently principle-averse chameleon is exactly the sort of person I’d want in office. If I had a bunch of loony unstatic policy preferences, I’d be thrilled that there’s a guy out there who’s shown time and again that he’s ready and willing to morph and mold his way into my loony mercurial heart. Republicans should be grateful!

Of course, the fear of Romney-like ideological maleability is that once you help get the guy in office, there’s no way to know how the “real Romney” will govern, and no way to ensure that he won’t wake up confused one morning and think he’s head of the United States of Massachusetts.

But this implies that there is no way to constrain a politician once he is in office, and that’s mistaken. In a way, the behavior of a totally cynical flip-flopper is much easier to predict than that of the true-believing ideologue. All you have to do in Romney’s case is figure out which constituency he is beholden to, and you know that his behavior will conform to reflect that. If he becomes president, this constituency foremost will be Congressional Republicans, along with all sorts of base activists and interest groups and donors and Republican governors and business types whose support he will continue to rely upon.

In Massachusetts he had a liberal constituency and a solid Democratic legislature, so bam, Romney was a socially moderate technocrat. He governed like he said he would govern. Who cares what he “really” was? Now his task is to appeal to the current—shall we say unbalanced—Republican orthodoxy; so viola, he’s aligned himself with all of their priorities. In the White House he’ll govern the same way, because he will be constrained politically by the very same constituency, particularly if his party has a majority in one or both houses of Congress.

Just as right-wingers probably have nothing to fear from a Romney presidency, progressives really have no reason to look forward to the idea, notwithstanding the likely accurate suspicions that “deep down” he is more moderate and more reality-based than his competitors. Progressives can be thankful that he doesn’t indulge the worst instincts of his party, but he’ll likely govern as a standard conservative, whatever that word happens to mean at the time.

After every post I write attempting to elucidate a small sliver of a difficult question, I’ll soon stumble upon a piece by some other writer which raises a different angle to the question that I did not consider. Sometimes it nicely supplements my own points, and sometimes it leaves my entire post in intellectual shatters. So it goes. This is a generalist blog which at its best aspires to synthesize widely disparate areas of human behavior and endeavor. It fails often; one can only synthesize so much, across so many domains. Only rare polymaths can weave together coherent narratives and analyses culled from the endless back catalogue of human history, politics, art, science, and economics. The rest of us operate within a narrow and attenuated amplitude, which is why it’s a nice idea to keep our conclusions modest and provisional.

This problem of information synthesis is why writers and policy analysts tend to specialize. Adam Smith explained the profound productivity benefits of labor division, but he also warned that such stark division might atrophy one’s interest in, and ability to understand, phenomena outside one’s particular domain. Specialization may in this way “corrupt the courage of the mind” and leave us ill-equipped to deal with multivariate issues of common concern.

As our modern systems and institutions become more complex, requiring more and more micro-specialization to understand each tiny constituent part, it becomes near impossible for anyone to step back and see how the systems relate to one another. As the complexity of modern political and economic life deepens, the systems become more globally integrated, and therefore more fragile. Just when the ability to synthesize and understand the totality is most urgent, hardly anyone among us is able to do so.

I think this unprecedented complexity and growing inability to synthesize information across domains has profound implications for our politics.

We are in the midst of a crisis of authority in this country in which the legitimacy of and trust in our traditional institutions has been undermined. The church, government, the Supreme Court, mass media, corporations, schools—are all experiencing near-historic lows in public confidence. Some of this is recession-related no doubt (bank hatred), but much of it is cumulative. Here is the basic state of things:

One reason for the growing public distrust in our elite institutions is the seeming failure of these institutions to foster shared prosperity and the inefficacy of our political class to resolve any of our most urgent problems.

But I think the basic inability of most people to understand what the hell is going on has some explanatory power as well. I think this lashing out at traditional institutions of authority is a reaction against the impotency in the face of the staggering complexity of our modern economic and political systems.

This dawning of complexity really began accelerating with the rise of globalization and the end of the Cold War, and culminated in two events: 9/11, and the financial crisis.

Prior to the end of the Cold War and the rise of true global integration, Americans to some degree had been insulated economically, culturally, and politically. Suddenly the shades were drawn up and we rubbed our collective eyes and we saw a whole interconnected world out our window. Unimaginably complicated financial interactions, political and religious ferment all around, previously dispossessed and impoverished societies demanding recognition and prosperity and security; beguiling technological breakthroughs. We rode a tech bubble through this vertiginous era, and easy credit and rising asset prices, along with unmatched military supremacy, helped provide the veneer of insularity to which we were so accustomed.

The veneer was stripped away on 9/11, and the modern world—by way of the 7th century—flooded in for good. We were offered innumerable explanations for what had happened. It was our freedom; it was foreign policy blowback, it was poverty, religion, the consequence of dictatorship and political repression. Americans had no historical context with which to make sense of it, and no ability to synthesize these complex and interconnected social disciplines. How to understand the lineage of Islamic thought and the wellsprings of accumulated grievance and pathology running through the Arab and Muslim world? I never learned about that in school. What of the sectarian and ethnic divisions that had convulsed a quarter of the world for a millennium? Nope.

As benumbed Americans fell back on the ready-made tropes of demonization and jingoism and nationalism, our elites were equally clueless. They gave us TSA, torture, warrantless surveillance, CIA kill lists. The president said Iraq and we said sounds good. We spent the next several years fumbling through ill-conceived and ill-executed wars in deeply hostile places, and at home we were changing the relationship between state and citizen, likely forever.

Then the financial crisis hit. While were were still flailing about through our newly-discovered political vulnerability, our crippling economic vulnerability revealed itself. We discovered our collective economic fate was controlled by unscrupulous bravados who conjured up exotic financial instruments that none of them understood, based on bunk risk models, in order to realize short term profits and bonuses. There was a whole new set of explanations and buzzwords: tranches, CDOs, Glass-Steagall, Dodd-Frank, Basel III, TARP, flash crashes, Fannie Freddie. There was a whole new cast of villians. Banks, yes, but also federal debt, public unions, Wall Street, the federal reserve system, China, illegal immigrants.

We are all now faced with the same problem of synthesis that I struggle with in miniature on the blog. How to understand and explain why the fate of our financial well-being depends on whether the Eurozone monetary union is fortified? On arcane votes by the Slovakian Parliament or popular referenda in Greece. Why American job growth depends on raising nominal GDP targets. Why income stagnation, rising inequality, why the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the rise of China and India. Where does education fit in? Health care? Immigration? And I hear those climate problems are still with us.

What of the hardening class lines and lack of income mobility in this country that entrap people by accident of birth? Is it regulations and marginal tax rates? Is it monetary policy? Is it our weak redistributive welfare state? Technological displacement? Unskilled immigration? Declining marriage rates? I have impressions but I don’t know! Who does?

So how have we reacted to this impenetrable thicket of complexity? Look back at the graph above. We lash out and rather indiscriminately blame all of our elite institutions of traditional authority. Faced with our own inability (with good reason!) to articulate substantive critiques and marshall sound arguments in support of our reflexive policy preferences, voters and politicians alike settle on simplistic platitudes, emotional appeals, identity- and heritage-mongering, slogans from perceived golden ages.

None of these phenomena are new, and of course it’s not the first time that bedeviling events have evolved beyond our capacity to understand them. But I believe this new brand of complexity we face, revealed emphatically by 9/11, globalization, and the financial crisis, has given us a slate of unprecedented policy challenges that admit of no apparent solution.

Attempting to synthesize these infinite data points across myriad academic sub-specialties may be futile for all but the freak geniuses among us; but alas, we are incorrigible pattern-seeking creatures and we’d rather settle on an impoverished narrative than no narrative at all (which likely describes this whole post). Politicians are as stymied and impotent as the rest of us. So they glom on to ready-made sophistry churned out by partisan think tanks, telling us it’s simple, we just do what we did before, we do what Reagan did thirty years ago, we regain our surety and our sense of agency by means of a mysterious alchemy involving American ingenuity and the rolling up of sleeves and squinting anew at the words of the founding fathers in search of hidden signposts.

I don’t mean to make this a partisan argument because I don’t think anyone is immune. But clearly a right-wing militarist political party with reactionary social instincts is especially vulnerable to all this. When you graft the profound changes in our culture on top of the political and economic morass, you have the recipe for a rather difficult Republican moment, which we are in the midst of now. What sort of basic ideological and cultural biases must one revisit and overturn in order to actually grapple with and assimilate these changes? Very few people are interested in that sort of skin-shedding. It will take a long time.

We have had amorphous protest movements on the right (Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Wall Street). Both have as their targets one or more institutions of traditional authority. In one way, the fall from grace of these instutitions is welcome, as they have proven themselves inept in dealing with the problems of compounding complexity.

But this loss of trust is also troubling. While these institutions are insufficient, they are also necessary. There is a worrying strain of nihilism running through this elite backlash. With the terminal undermining of trust in our institutions, the very idea of collective action in response to national problems takes a hit as well.

Politically and electorally, this will lead to a tumultous time. If our elite institutions are seen as suspect and effete, the politicians empowered to run and regulate them will be seen that way as well. This will induce a period of rapid electoral see-sawing as we flit from one partisan savior to another. This constant instability might make our institutions even less effective and further undermine public trust, leading to ever-more violent electoral swings and partisan rancor.

That’s a rather dystopian vision and I hope I’m wrong. But I do not see our reaction to the problems of network complexity and multivariate synthesis growing more sophisticated any time soon. In the meantime you can continue watching me lurch about for answers.

In the manifestations of anti-Semitism throughout history, there’s always been an unresolvable tension in the purported nature of the Jewish threat: Either the Jews are said to be a weak, racially inferior, unwashed infestation who deserve to be marginalized and ghettoized; or else it’s that the Jews secretly control the world through various high-level conspiracies which allow them to pull all the levers of power of global finance, business, entertainment, and government. They’re all-powerful or sub-human; the fevered mind of bigotry can never seem to decide. 

I think there’s a similar theme at work when people try to explain the nature of the threat posed by illegal immigration. Either the invading hispanic immigrants are said to want nothing more than to sneak into this country so they can be lazy and not pay taxes and mooch off the American social welfare system; or else the same group is so industrious and self-sacrificing that they will steal all the jobs and put lower-skill Americans out of work. They’re not good enough to be here, and too good.

I for one am still eagerly awaiting a check in the mail representing my share of the spoils of global Jewish hegemony, but the reality of course is that in both instances, ethnocentric prejudices say far more about the expounders than the supposed objects.

The hard economic times have led, as they often do, to a coarsening nativist attitude in this country, and a renewed virulence directed at undocumented immigrants. We see this in Arizona’s recent anti-immigrant legislation, as well as Alabama’s win-the-future policy of terrifying its hispanic schoolchildren and making them cry. We saw it in last night’s GOP debate with the candidates duelling over who can come up with the most elaborate evil-genius design of a border fence, and a vision of border security that involves electrified barbed-wire, military troops, Predator drones—basically the Waziristanification of the southern United States. Can’t wait.

Predictably, there is growing evidence that the abstract instinct to marginalize hispanic immigrants is banging up against the very concrete labor needs of the harvest:

Jerry Spencer had an idea after Alabama’s tough new law against illegal immigration scared Hispanic workers out of the tomato fields northeast of Birmingham: Recruit unemployed U.S. citizens to do the work, give them free transportation and pay them to pick the fruit and clean the fields.

After two weeks, Spencer said Monday, the experiment is a failure. Jobless resident Americans lack the physical stamina and the mental toughness to see the job through, he said, and there’s not much of a chance a new state program to fill the jobs will fare better. […]

Spencer said that of more than 50 people he recruited for the work, only a few worked more than two or three days, and just one stuck with the job for the last two weeks….

Spencer said the people weren’t in good enough physical condition to work harder or longer hours and typically gave up when faced with acre after acre of tomato plants ready to be picked.

Farmers in Colorado are finding the same thing:

[Colorado farmer John Harold] has participated for about a decade in a federal program called H-2A that allows seasonal foreign workers into the country to make up the gap where willing and able American workers are few in number. He typically has brought in about 90 people from Mexico each year from July through October.

This year, though, with tough times lingering and a big jump in the minimum wage under the program, to nearly $10.50 an  hour, Mr. Harold brought in only two-thirds of his usual contingent. The other positions, he figured, would be snapped up by jobless local residents wanting some extra summer cash.

“It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said….

Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard.

The story notes that most of the local residents Harold hired were actually Hispanic themselves, who perhaps at one time immigrated for agricultural work but have since gone on to better jobs in construction or landscaping. Here is the big upshot:

The broader story of labor in agriculture, economists and historians said, is that through good times and bad and across socioeconomic lines, people who find better lives off the farm rarely return.

Manual farm work sucks, and nobody who has had a taste of it ever wants to go back. Instead of promoting reverence and respect for those who do it, we elevate people in the public square who find more use out of demonizing a vulnerable outgroup.

To those, including several Republican candidates, who believe themselves to be against illegal immigration only because they are SO SUPPORTIVE of legal immigration, it must always be noted that for Mexicans who have no advanced skills nor any family connections in the U.S., there is no path to permanent legal residence whatsoever. No "line to wait in," no "doing it the right way," no opportunity to "respect the process." If people are so offended by the law-breaking which attends the process by which certain people contract out their labor in exchange for money—a scandalous concept, I know—they should stop fellow-travelling with the genuine bigots and demagogues, and instead advocate for aligning what is legal with what is right, and necessary. 

Economists have been fretting about income stagnation in this country for a while. Tyler Cowen popularized it anew earlier this year with his ebook, titled, appropriately enough, The Great Stagnation. Here is Cowen explaining his thesis if you’re interested:

Here’s the graph showing steady real wage growth (in red) since WWII which abruptly ends in 1973. We’ve basically been treading water ever since:

There are many reasons for this income stagnation. Cowen argues that a main driver of our pocketbook woes is that the pace of innovation has slowed dramatically since the middle of the 20th century. By the 1970s, we’ve already got the contours of the modern industrial and consumer economy: cars, planes, televisions, kitchen appliances, penicillin, plumbing, mass literacy and education, cheap energy, etc. We sucked a century of economic growth out of these innovations. By contrast, since the 1970s the innovations we’ve seen have not lead to a comparable increase in our standard of living. We’re not getting richer as fast as we used to.

You might wonder, "But surely the rise of the internet and the amazing gains in communications technology since the 1990s have done us some good." And they have, but while that good has made it much easier to entertain ourselves and keep in contact with each other, it hasn’t really shown up in our paychecks. 

David Leonhardt echoes Cowen’s argument in an excellent and ominous piece in the NYT over the weekend. Leonhardt notes that while the Great Depression was not exactly a rosy time for the country, at least Americans of the 1930s were on the cusp of taking advantage of all of those transformative technologies and innovations listed above. Today, we have no analogous progressive boom to look forward to. Yes, we have plenty of high-tech gadgets that improve our daily lives in ways that don’t necessarily show up in GDP, but they’re not making us any richer.

The financial crisis has exacerbated all of these stagnation trends, with real median household income falling by 10% since 2007. It’s an extraordinary drop and the largest in decades. The crisis is compounded by longer-term problems which Leonhardt lists as "a decade-long slowdown in new-business formation, the stagnation of educational gains and the rapid growth of industries with mixed blessings, including finance and health care."

Leonhardt builds a pursuasive case, concluding that our problems "raise the possibility that the United States is not merely suffering through a normal, if severe, downturn. Instead, it may have entered a phase in which high unemployment is the norm."

He makes a meager attempt at an optimistic conclusion but abandons it quickly:

Maybe some American scientist in a laboratory somewhere is about to make a breakthrough. Maybe an entrepreneur is on the verge of creating a great new product. Maybe the recent health care and financial-regulation laws will squeeze the bloat.

For now, the evidence for such optimism remains scant. And the economy remains millions of jobs away from being even moderately healthy.

Tyler Cowen always makes the point that he believes our innovation stagnation is a temporary lull, and those pocketbook-enhancing breakthroughs and innovations will indeed rescue us from our current plight. Matt Yglesias also finds a small bit of optimism:

[O]ne good thing about relative American decline is that with every passing year it becomes more and more likely that something cool and useful will be invented in some foreign country…. [G]rowth in the develop[ing] world means that the circle of potential innovators is growing much larger. That at least creates the conditions under which we might see some good luck.

We can see that the developing world is now reaping the same gains that the U.S. experienced in the early part of the 20th century; catch-up growth propelled by the "low-hanging fruit" of mass education, urbanization, transportation infrastructure, etc. This innovation stuff is not zero-sum: It’s marginally better if breakthroughs happen here, but if they come from Bangalore or Shanghai, that’s pretty great too. We desperately need it.