Selling the Product
It's four days old now, which is like a million years in blog-time, but I wanted to say something about Eric Alterman's take on Robert Wright's great bigthink essay on national security policy.
Alterman says the problem with Wright's essay is that "he glides over its salability."
It’s not so hard to come up a sensible-sounding foreign policy that makes sense on an op-ed page or in a Council on Foreign Relations presentation—or even one that will make Joe Klein stand up and scream, “The liberal wing of the Democratic Party hates America.” But it’s damn hard to come up with one about which Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and ultimately, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews will not whine that it's wimpy and does not allow for enough chest-beating and innocent-people-killing. Wright may be right, which would be great; but if he’s serious, he’s going to have to spend a lot more time figuring out how to sell it.
This is clearly not-wrong. And yet, I also think it's not-right. In a lot of ways, I think the obsession with devising something "saleable" in the national security realm has become a crippling problem for progressives. To my way of thinking, in order to sell something effectively the first thing you need to do is be clear to yourself what you're selling and why. It's naive to believe that a pure politics of conviction is sufficient to win elections. It is, however, a necessary starting point.
If you're going to compromise your ideals somewhat in the quest to win -- as tends to happen in practical politics -- you need, at a minimum, to understand what your ideal agenda is and how the different elements of it relate. You need to know which things are tangential and compromisable and which are the core elements you need to be prepared to fight to the death for. You need to have a framework in place that lets you start thinking about new questions that arise without needing to go all the way back to the drawing board.
What's more, at the end of the day coming up with a big awesome sales pitch probably isn't Wright's comparative advantage in the world any more than it's mine. There are plenty of people out there who are professional pollsters, speechwriters, ad-makers, etc. They're going to be the ones who do most of the heavy lifting in devising a sales pitch. But to do their work effectively, they actually need to be constrained somewhat in terms of what in terms of what they say. They need to be coming up with a pitch that politicians are actually prepared to offer with a plausible semblance of conviction. Your political positioning can't look like pure political positioning if it's supposed to work.
Last, I'll observe that while it's certainly not the case that "good policy is always good politics" it's at least a good starting point. If you'd said in March 2003, "look, the UN inspectors are in, they're not finding any WMD; there's no need to start a war now, there's no immediate threat and it looks like there may not be any threat at all; if we invade, we'll topple Saddam but actually running Iraq is going to turn out to be really difficult -- years from now our troops will be fighting a guerilla war, the situation will be a terrible mess, and nobody's going to have any good answers" you probably would have wound up in some hot water politicially. But you'd be looking pretty smart by November 2004, and really smart by November 2006.
Trying to come up with the most popular thing to say at the moment, by contrast, hasn't served Democrats very well. Supporting popular bad ideas just makes it hard for you to take advantage of the inevitable public backlash when the idea turns out to go poorly and ceases to be popular.
Great post and what you say is even more true on domestic policy. Take a look at the sentence below from Hillary's DLC column in the Denver Post. What is that selling? To me, it looks like it is selling conservatism. I thought we already should have the opportunity to afford health insurance it is actually having the ability to afford it that is the problem. We already have the responsibility to obtain health insurance, it's the unavailability of it that is the problem.
And have you ever seen a statement more directly oppposed to universal health care? Health care isn't a human right to Hillary any more, health insurance is the responsibility of the bread winner. So where are we? We are a nation with only two major political parties and neither offers Americans the option of voting to make health care available to all.
The frame has become the ideology and the ideology is conservative.
July 21, 2006 5:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, it's worse -- pure authoritarianism: "You vill purchase health insurance or else!"
July 21, 2006 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
You don't have the flavor of the Swiss version. In Switzerland, all that is not compulsory is forbidden. It is, however, compulsory to be happy.
Just from normal timescales, I'd have thought Disney got that from them, but I suspect a time machine and it's the other way around. Think of "Springtime for Hitler" with Mickey Mouse in the title role.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 21, 2006 5:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here are two more:
Hmm if the "opportunity" for a secure retirement succeeds at the rate of the typical new business, the DLC must have something other than Social Security in mind, but then "Social" doesn't fit the frame.
July 21, 2006 5:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Smart or not, people who said this are still not getting much airtime. Scott Ritter said something more precise, that there would be no WMDs at all except for some non-functional chemical weapons left over from the Iraq/Iran war. This turned out to be right on the money, but as far as I can tell, he's still treated as a pariah by most of the media.
July 22, 2006 8:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
OT, but I lived in Zurich for a year and did get the impression that the Swiss have a subtly different idea of the role of government from Americans. It seemed more along the lines that laws are a benevolent force that can add structure to society. I would contrast this from the typically American view that government is a necessary evil (just how necessary and how evil are the disagreements that determine our political affiliations). It comes down to a burden of proof question. By the necessary evil principle, you'd look at every law as an infringement of freedom and only consider it if there is a substantial, demonstrable public good. While I understand that Switzerland has been a Republic for a very long time, I don't think this burden of proof test is even applied in principle. A law is put there if there's a consensus along the lines of "good people live this way." I guess it would be a little like having a country run by your home owners association. I think it works for them because of shared cultural assumptions.
July 22, 2006 8:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
hmmm, I think you may really be getting at something there that turns a lot of people off about Hillary Clinton...it's framing & presentation, a bark always worse than bite thing...and that was true, I am thinking, even before her transformation into Miz Hawk?
She's my Senator, and I do note this in a lot of more local issues, she's almost purposely unspecific and shrill in most public declarations, while if you watch her in something like a hearing on C-Span that 0.05% of the public is watching, she's nuanced and really micro-manages details.
July 22, 2006 8:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
deleted duplicate.
July 22, 2006 8:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Wright may be right, which would be great; but if he’s serious, he’s going to have to spend a lot more time figuring out how to sell it."
This is an ambiguous and probably meaningless thing for Alterman to say. Matthews's comment on it is right: an idea has to be true before it can be sold.
There are several kinds of truth in Wright's article (e.g. self interest works best when it incorporates the interest of others. . .), but ultimately the article is a melange of bits and pieces from the realist and idealist camps that sounds like not much more than Clintonism revived. Wright accepts free trade and free markets as the only functioning economic system, and makes such meaningless recommendations as empowering the WTO to enforce labor and environmental protections. At the same time he endorses the Rumsfeldian fantasy of better intelligence (which essentially means global undercover surveillance)and the profoundly hypocritical and unrealistic idea of more intrusive weapons inspections (hypocritical because it would never apply to Israel or the US.)
Matthew's comment is right on and one I really could have used about thirty years ago in graduate school: "this is not wrong. But it's also not right."
July 22, 2006 10:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Forget about selling points. I'm just suprised anybody could read the Wright article and find anything in it that is "great", or constitutes "big thinking". The problem with Wright's piece is not its absence of salesmanship - its that it is thoroughly boring and conventional, and contains nothing new and interesting to sell. There is nothing in it that I have not read in every other piece of dessicated and shopworn neoliberal internationalist automatism for the past five years. It is soulless and banal and unimaginative and spiritually lame - the typical output of the complacent professional class.
Here would be one alternative way of developing a "bigthink" piece: You take a look at the nature of the world as it exists in 2006, and at the nature of the US position in that world. You describe that world in ugly and depressing detail. You articulate, in detail, what is wrong with that world from a deeply feeling, humane and enlightened perspective - not the perspective of a bureaucratic manager or new class technocrat. You draw on the legacy of humanity's deepest thinkers and teachers, and the most penetrating observers of the human consition. You then develop a realistic but visionary image of how that world could be made substantially better through political transformation; an image of how to alleviate the pain of groaning humanity through dilligence, solidarity and courage exercised over a long period of time. And then you formulate a long-terms strategy for accomplishing that change, and say how the people of United States and other countries could take the first small baby steps in accomplishing that long-term human plan.
When you read someone like Wright and try to find what they think is wrong about the world, the answer seems to be ... um, not much really. Or at least not much, so long as you turn the clock back to 1997 instead of 2006. It's still all about preading free markets; spreading political "pluralism"; returning to the internationalist approach to nuclear proliferation; relying on a little more diplomacy and cooperation. That's about it. And it id always about means for those people, never ultimate ends.
The only passage in Wright's article that comes close to touching on a visionary idea is this one:
... We need multilateral structures capable of decisively forceful intervention and nation building — ideally under the auspices of the United Nations, which has more global legitimacy than other candidates. America should lead in building these structures and thereafter contribute its share, but only its share. To some extent, the nurturing of international institutions and solid international law is simple thrift.
But Wright says nothing at all about what these "structures" will look likeow they could be built, and how they will achieve the goal he sets for them. So one wonders whether he has any concrete notion in mind at all, or if he is just lost in a the usual forign policy dreamwork of fine thoughts and liberal impulses.
A lot of us don't believe in the "end of history" neoliberal vision which has bedazzled the vision and parched the souls of Americas privileged class and leadership intellectual elite since the end of the Cold War. We don't think that Clintonian America was basically just fine and only needs to be spread around the world; we don't accept that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the world economically that a little free trade and civil society won't fix. We see a world of violence, greed, oppression and despair that are not just accidents of the neoliberal order, but essential components of it. We see deep and fundamental problems with the way people live now in America and other modern developed societies - with the way they organize work and communities, the way they care for themselves and others, and with their futile and anxiety-driven mania for devising ever more efficient and alienating means for the acquisiton of the objects of their restless material and carnal needs.
July 22, 2006 12:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
We don't think that Clintonian America was basically just fine and only needs to be spread around the world; we don't accept that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the world economically that a little free trade and civil society won't fix. We see a world of violence, greed, oppression and despair that are not just accidents of the neoliberal order, but essential components of it. We see deep and fundamental problems with the way people live now in America and other modern developed societies - with the way they organize work and communities, the way they care for themselves and others, and with their futile and anxiety-driven mania for devising ever more efficient and alienating means for the acquisiton of the objects of their restless material and carnal needs.
You may be correct, but the only way you will possibly convince anyone else of this is by employing the tools of freedom and civil society. Only if you are free and able to express what you believe are the deeper problems in the modern developed world, and if everyone else is free and able to comprehend what you are saying will you have any hope of convincing anyone. And if people are paranoid about where their next meal comes or whether their neighbor is plotting to kill them, they simply aren't going to stop and ponder the deeper meaning of life.
The problems you cite with Wright's essay are actually it's strengths. The ultimate ends of society should not be decided in advance and pushed on everyone top-down. This is doubly wrong--it's wrong because it's coercive, and it's wrong because the whole point of society and humanity is to discover what those ultimate ends are in the first place.
Maybe you don't believe that human thought and discussion will tend to improve the world and discover the ultimate meaning, but other than divine revelation what other alternative do we have?
Not to mention that it seems a bit silly to accuse Robert Wright of not being concerned with ultimate ends.
Specifying the exact shape of new institutions is not always helpful and sometimes dangerous, because an institution's legitimacy depends on more the the formal rules beneathe it. It also depends on the honesty and credibility of the people running it. That can only be judged by experience with the institution, and so we should only give power to organizations and leaders after they prove themselves worthy of it.
I'm not going to argue whether or not Wright's thinking is conventional. But if he is being conventional, then America's biggest foreign policy problem right now is a lack of conventional thinking.
July 23, 2006 9:47 AM | Reply | Permalink