Closed markets may have been a fundamental problem during the 1950s and 1960s; it is hard to believe they still are. The greatest risk to globalisation is elsewhere. It lies in the prospect that national governments’ room for manoeuvre will shrink to such levels that they will be unable to deliver the policies that their electorates want and need in order to buy into the global economy.

It's nice to see people once again arguing that millionaires have to be nice to the regular people or they'll burn down the millionaires' houses, rather than arguing that regular people have to be nice to millionaires or the millionaires will burn down the regular people's houses, as they have since the '80s.

But I'm kind of confused about what Rodrik is saying will happen. So national governments' room for maneuver shrinks. And then...what? Will they reinstate protectionism? But if that only leads to economic ruin, which is what would likely happen in today's integrated world economy, then voters won't continue voting for it, will they? I mean, if governments' room for maneuver shrinks, doesn't that mean by definition that there isn't much they can do to limit or reverse market-liberalizing policies? Or does Rodrik think there are ways in which governments can defy the global trade regime that concretely benefit voters? If so, what are those ways? That seems like the nub of the question.

When we Americans pick a leader, we usually look for the Leonidas type: direct, faithful and upright. We usually pick someone we hope is uplifting. Especially since Watergate, Americans have sought presidents uncorrupted by capital intrigue…But I wonder if this will be the election in which voters seek out a Themistocles, an election in which they put aside dreams of finding somebody pure and good, and select somebody they think will be wily and effective.

The increasing authoritarianism of the Putin government is indeed depressing, and a tragic period in Russian history. But the current spat is pretty obviously not about democracy and human rights, as any cursory search for similar condemnations by Cheney of, say, the Saudi Arabian or Kazakh governments makes clear. It's about Iran. Russia has refused to stop selling the Iranians nuclear technology or to support US demands for UN-imposed sanctions to punish Iranian noncompliance with the IAEA. Cheney's speech is transparent retaliation for Russian non-cooperation on Iran.

On a broader note, this may be the clearest elucidation yet that all mushmouthing by the Bush administration over spreading freedom throughout the world is so much cynical cant. The Administration uses democracy and human-rights issues as tools to reward or punish countries for cooperating with or opposing US foreign policy. They're just propaganda points. If you go along with the GWOT, you can throw your political opponents in jail and name the month of April after yourself, should you so desire, with nary a peep from Bushco. If you buck us on GWOT, though, woe be unto you for suspiciously auditing the taxes of the local branch of Greenpeace!

And this, of course, is what Bush meant in that foreign-policy state-of-the-union address a couple years back, when he said that the US's ideals and its interests were now one. He meant that from now on, our ideals - freedom, human rights, and democracy - would become propaganda tools which we cynically and selectively deploy in the pursuit of our interests.

He recalled that, during his first tenure as defense secretary during the Ford administration, he had decided to fit the M1 Abrams battle tank with a turbine engine and a 120 millimeter cannon, overriding the Army's own choices.

Is this for real? Rumsfeld personally decided to customize the M-1 to his own tastes? Did he have them put in a Blaupunkt, too? Airbrush a chick riding a dragon on the hood? Or is this an "I invented the internet" moment? 

Mr. Past: Your big problem is you don't understand the limits of what governments can achieve. Before this whole Iraq thing, you should have read Elie Kedourie's essay on the British occupation in the 1920's. This isn't history repeating itself, it's the same unbroken pattern.

Kedourie shows the whole history of Iraq is a story of "bloodshed, treason and rapine." He shows how Iraqi politics have always been marked by "murderous currents," "demonic hatreds," "grisly spectacles," Sunni violence and Shiite fanaticism. He shows naïve Westerners who thought they could change all this. He even quotes a memo from a British officer saying Britain should threaten to withdraw because then the Iraqis will be forced to behave responsibly. It's all the same!

So far, so sane. One might take issue with this argument on the grounds that it makes the same error as Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts" did a decade ago, ascribing too much of the civil war to unexplained "ancient hatreds" and not enough to the actual dynamics which create and encourage sectarian tensions in weakening modern states: competition over scarce resources, especially state-apportioned resources like government jobs or nationalized oil revenues; state failure to ensure security, provoking the establishment of sectarian militias to fill the security gap; and so forth. But it's an argument, anyway.

So then, Brooks brings in his counter-arguer, Mr. Future, who will rely on his own third-party historical narrative to describe the Iraqi adventure of the past 3 years. (Presumably we're supposed to side with Mr. Future, since he represents, you know, the future.) And what historical narrative does Mr. Future choose? Germany under the Marshall Plan, perhaps, as described by Arthur Schlesinger? Not exactly.

It's Exodus.

Mr. Future: Actually, I did read Kedourie, but last night I also reread the Exodus story. The Exodus story reminds us that human beings can transform themselves and their situations. It reminds us that people who embark on generational journeys are the realistic ones, because they are the ones who see all the possibilities the future contains.

The finest things humans have done have been achieved in an Exodus frame of mind. This country was settled and founded by people who adopted the Exodus mentality. The civil rights movement was also led by such people.

I actually had a similar experience last night, but instead of rereading Exodus, I was re-watching the Disney animated film "Mulan" with my 3-year-old daughter. And it occurred to me that while Kedourie may have his points, based on boring research in all those dusty old colonial documents and blah blah blah, "Mulan" shows that even though savage, rapacious, amoral hordes like the Huns or the Iraqi terrorists might seem to be unstoppable in the middle of the movie, the good guys will always triumph in the end because good guys believe in gender equality, and bad guys don't. (Ladies of the US Armed Forces - you go!) Actually it was my 3-year-old daughter who made this point, but I think she was dead on.

Actually, I had another thought, for a little Mr. Past - Mr. Future socratic dialogue of my own. It goes like this.

Mr. Past: I have a job with a six-figure salary at the most prestigious newspaper in the United States. All I have to do is write about 1200 words twice a week with a witty slant on current events. I don't do any research, and sometimes what I write doesn't even make sense. Ain't I the shizzum!

Mr. Future: I have what is called a blog. I write 1200 words with a witty slant on current events once or twice a day. Often, I conduct original research into these topics, and I invite others to come onto my site and either comment on what I've written or conduct original research of their own and present it. I also sometimes respond in posts to what my readers write. Most of my posts make more sense than the insane thing you wrote this morning. I do all this for free. There are thousands of me for every one of you. Why do you still have a job?

It is time to conclude that, with the demise of modern revolutionary politics over the past generation, the Terror simply no longer belongs to that part of the historical record which seems to speak directly and vitally to our contemporary experience.

Now, I'm the first to agree that the totalitarian model of state domination has ceased to be the great threat juxtaposed to Western ideals of freedom and democracy, a role it played from Burke's response to the Terror all the way through the liberal response to Nazism and Communism, Orwell, the Thatcher/Reagan years, and its final misplaced and pathetic denouement in the neocon view of the invasion of Iraq. Today, the great threats to Western ideals of freedom and democracy lie in failed states, anarchy, non-state violent organizations, and the impunity of multinational corporations to democratic rule.

But to say that the Terror no longer speaks to contemporary experience is very, very premature; and it may always remain premature. It has not been very long at all since the last seizure of power by a group of fanatical, "incorruptible" ideologues who proceeded to exterminate their political foes in order to construct an unassailable base of power, only to find the list of enemies proliferating wildly and uncontrollably until it came to include many of the instigators of the purges themselves. It has been two hundred and ten-odd years since Robespierre; only thirty since Pol Pot, and ten since the Taliban. There seems little reason not to include Cromwell in the timeline, pushing the origin back another hundred and fifty years. Meanwhile, candidates to host the next revolutionary ideological bloodbath include Nepal and, yes, Iraq, should any faction ever come out on top of the civil war there.

Witchhunts and political centralization are both phenomena of mass society. Their progeny, hysterical state terror, has been around as long as the modern state itself. There seems little reason to believe that it will disappear until the modern state does, and that looks to be a long way off yet.

But there is one great dividing line here, between you and me on one side, and Bush and his cohort (and the Christianists and the Islamists and the scientific reductionists, and all the other -ists) on the other: the humility of a faith based on love, with its attendant qualities of acceptance, inclusion and non-violence, and the arrogance of a faith based on fear, with its attendant qualities of judgment, exclusion and, inevitably, violence.

Sullivan agrees:

The battle within faith - between a faith of certainty and order and a faith of humility and wonder - is indeed the great battle of our time.

This struck me, a cultural but non-believing Jew, as a statement of faith which I could wholeheartedly embrace. I mean, I don't agree that it's "the great battle of our time" - I'd say the struggle to keep humans from destroying Planet Earth probably outranks it, even in God's eyes, whatever she may be. But I embrace it as a statement about moral and intellectual attitudes. And what I wonder is this: does Sullivan recognize that agnostics, atheists, and secular liberals also believe in "a faith of humility and wonder" rather than "a faith of certainty and order"?

Rationalism is, at its very core, a philosophy of humility, doubt, and wonder. Nothing could be more scientific than the conviction that we do not understand how the universe works, but that we seek to understand it through observation and discussion; nothing could be more liberal than the conviction that we do not know what moral perfection is, but that we strive towards it by testing our values upon the world and upon each other.

But this isn't quite what I mean to say. My point is that rationalism and secular liberalism are, themselves, types of faith: faith in our ability to trust others, and to trust our own commitment to reason. No scientist can claim to have observed with her own eyes the evidence for every proposition she holds to be true; she must have faith in the truthfulness of generations of other scientists, and in their dedication to following the rules of the scientific community. And the liberal faith that humans are capable of deciding what is best for them, as a community, through the process of free speech and respect for human rights, and by following the rules of a republic, and that democratic participation leads ultimately to the best kind of governance, is just that - a faith. Humans have not shown themselves to be particularly dedicated to reason or to human rights over the last century; the conviction that they are progressively becoming better on these counts is a basic liberal value, a statement of faith in human possibility.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to point out that everybody has values, and the kinds of values Sullivan embraces here as a part of his kind of Christianity are to a great extent the same values I embrace as a secular liberal Jew. I would hope he would recognize that.

Dozens of bodies, garroted or executed with gunshots to the head, are turning up almost daily in Baghdad alone. The gruesome work is usually attributed to death squads or Shiite militias, some in Iraqi police or army uniforms. Meanwhile, powerful bombings, a favorite tactic of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency, continue to devastate civilian areas and Iraqi bases or recruitment centers....The number of kidnappings of Iraqis is surging because of an explosion of criminal gangs working for their own gain or with armed political groups....At the same time, American commanders have decreased the number of their patrols and have tried to push the Iraqi security forces into a more visible role.

What is the point of having US troops in Iraq if they aren't actually preventing the civil war that would supposedly ensue only if we retreated? Obviously, the troops' number one concern is saving their own hides - and one can hardly blame them. One can, however, wonder why we continue to spend over a hundred billion dollars a year to keep them there when they are neither bringing democracy to Iraq nor even preventing the country from falling apart. The argument for immediate withdrawal keeps getting stronger.

 His first objection is wilfully obtuse. In response to proponents of scrapping the electoral college who note that voters in all non-battleground states are essentially excluded from the campaign, he writes:

It seems to assume that voters in New York and Texas are somehow excluded from awareness of everything that happens in the campaign -- as if the newspapers and TV stations in their states were not covering it every day.

First of all, elections aren't supposed to be spectator sports; they're supposed to be participatory ones. As a New Yorker, I may have "awareness" of whether or not Joe Torre decided to pull his ace in the bottom of the 8th and send in Mariano Rivera, but I don't get to vote on the decision. I am, however, supposed to get a say in who becomes President; but because, again, I am a New Yorker, I basically have none. My state will always vote for the Democrat (unless it be George McGovern). If we scrapped the Electoral College, my vote would be worth as much as that of, say, somebody in Philadelphia.

 Secondly, the point  is that the campaign is  directed towards people who live in battleground states. The fact that I can watch the candidates on TV promising more anti-Castro sops to Cuban-Americans in Florida or more farm subsidies to agrobusiness interests in Missouri serves mainly to confirm my knowledge that they don't care about my vote or my issues. "The campaign" isn't some static thing that just exists independent of the voters it's trying to appeal to - much as elite members of the Washington press corps might think it does.

 Broder next name-checks Mighty Shibboleth.

Past efforts to abolish the electoral college have foundered on the objections of small states, which worry that they would be ignored in the pursuit of giant voting blocs in big population centers. Have their claims no merit?

No, they don't. Presidential candidates currently ignore almost all small states, because they aren't competitive. The only small states which received any attention in 2004 were New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire, Maine and West Virginia - because they were battleground states. Hawaii, Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Wyoming were utterly neglected, and Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma and other smallish states barely received a nod. The candidates spent between peanuts and nothing on advertising in these states, and they didn't campaign there, so it's hard to see how the EC kept them from being "ignored". In fact, the entire 2004 election was basically waged in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio - all large states. Broder knows this perfectly well; the studies pointing this out have been public for years now, so for him to resurrect the old small-states shibboleth is just wilful obtuseness.

 Broder's final objection appears reasonable, but is actually smoke and mirrors:

past proposals for direct election have snagged on the question of allowing a simple plurality to win or requiring a runoff if no candidate receives more than, say, 40 percent of the vote.

This issue raises no greater issue with the proposed change in the EC than it does with the current system. The proposed change would simply direct that each state award all its representatives to the winner of the national vote, rather than to the winner of its internal vote.  If that winner had won only a plurality, rather than an absolute majority, he would still get all the state's votes - just as plurality-winner Bill Clinton did with each state's individual votes in 1992 and 1996. We needed no runoff then, and we would need no runoff under the proposal.

Broder worries that the proposed system might tempt more third-party candidates to enter, to try to "tip the balance" in the race. It is difficult to understand why this would happen. Third-party candidates draw support from those candidates closest to them ideologically, so the only possible effect of such candidacies would be to pose a greater threat of awarding the election to the candidate who is more distant from them ideologically. Such weirdly kamikaze candidacies may sometimes occur - and, indeed, they already do. In 5 of the 10 elections since 1968, a third-party candidate has had a significant effect on the outcome, usually paradoxical. Why would a truly national voter base make such candidacies more likely? If anything, they might make them LESS attractive. In 2000, for example, progressives in New York felt comfortable voting for Nader because they knew their states would go for Gore, and thus their votes would not end up electing Bush. With truly national elections, these voters would be unlikely to indulge in such protest voting.

Broder's final verdict is fascinating:

That is why a change of this scale requires careful consideration -- something the amendment process provides and this mechanism is designed to circumvent.

This opinion appears to have been captured by a giant radar array from its point of emanation on some distant political planet in another galaxy. The idea that any proposals in our modern American political system are the result of "careful consideration", rather than a fortuitously powerful alignment of interested forces backed by a groundswell created in the wake of a crisis, is laughable. In the late 1970s people at least pretended that politics worked this way. (Actually for a while in the early 1990s they did, too.) Today they have long stopped pretending. This moment, while the memories of Florida '00 and Ohio '04 are still fresh, is the moment to scrap the antiquated rusting hulk of the Electoral College. We do it now, or we'll be stuck with it for another century or until the country collapses into revolution and we rewrite the Constitution - which, the way things are going lately, will probably come first.

What kind of nonsense is that? This guy has Richard Land's number on speed dial. It's one thing for him to claim he doesn't believe the war in Iraq is a sign of the End Times. (Though in fact, he didn't claim that.) But it's ludicrous for him to claim he's never heard of the notion - as ludicrous as it would be for him to claim not to have heard of Intelligent Design, or of the idea that cutting taxes increases revenues, or of the University of Texas Longhorns. This idea is a mainstay of his political base. Who on earth is going to believe that he's never heard of it? Doesn't the religious right get outraged at this kind of transparently false repudiation? It's bad enough to be left at the altar, but when your fiance claims he never even met you...!

This ought to be George W. Bush's "I didn't inhale" moment - a moment of transparent evasion and pandering to the center that fools no one. "First I've heard of it, by the way"; it's the leitmotif of the guy's whole existence.

1. Luxury cabins on the USS Ronald Reagan. Charge billionaires $1 million per night  for a deluxe stateroom on the US Navy's latest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, so they can observe firsthand as America's troops deploy to the Persian Gulf to do their bidding (keep the oil flowing through US petro corporations, protect the shaky kingdoms of sheikhs who invest large amounts in US equities, and so forth). Who's the real commander, anyway? Some pesky admiral? Or the talented CEOs who issue his marching orders?

 2. Billionaire Russian Roulette. How would you like to win a trillion dollars? Then come play the biggest-stakes lottery of them all - Billionaire Russian Roulette! The stakes aren't for just anybody: it's a billion dollars a ticket in this sweepstakes, so you'll be competing against your peers in the elite of society. If you don't win, of course, you'll be bankrupt. But that's the fun of it! Have you got the balls to play? Sponsored by the US Treasury. (Note: assuming a modest 50% profit over payouts, this one could enable the US treasury to pay off as much as 6% of the national debt!)

That's just a couple to get started. Anybody else have any ideas?

What's different about health insurance is the opposite: Much of it isn't insurance at all but a subsidy. The value of the subsidy is the difference between what the individual pays and what the insurance would cost in the free market. If people were buying health care or insurance with their own money, they might or might not spend too much—whatever "too much" is—but no one else would need to care if they did.

A subsidy has to take from someone and give to someone else. Everybody can't subsidize everybody. Or, to put it another way, society cannot give the average citizen better health care than the average citizen would choose to buy on his or her own. And this is what people want.

I don't really understand what Kinsley is trying to say here, but I'm pretty sure it's totally wrong. And baffling. This construct of the "average citizen" whose decisions to buy health care "on his or her own" must, axiomatically, equal the total health care purchased by the polity, divided by the number of citizens... This just seems like complete nonsense. If every American were required to buy, say, national defense individually, how many nuclear-powered aircraft carriers would result? Zero, obviously. (Unless maybe Rupert Murdoch decided to really go on a binge.)

As for the distinction between "insurance" and "subsidies"...this is a totally bizarre distinction. Insurance, obviously, is a subsidy: it is the subsidy of the unlucky by the lucky. We do it because 1. none of us are entirely sure that we or our children won't wind up unlucky, and 2. societies which treat all of their citizens AS IF they might just as easily have been lucky as unlucky, end up with happier and more productive citizens, and are simply better places to live. Anyway, what people want to get through single-payer isn't better CARE than the average citizen would choose to buy on his or her own; it's better COVERAGE. And that is easily attainable - in fact, the simple fact that it is universal renders it in that crucial sense superior to any individually purchased coverage, because it is guaranteed, regardless of whether you lose your job or become impoverished.

This isn't a zero-sum game; changing the system changes the whole landscape of available assets. Just like anything else in economics. But especially in health care. To give one example: Kinsley worries about more people wanting access to $100,000-dollar-a-year pills. But with most pills, doubling the number of people taking them makes it possible to cut the cost of the medication drastically, because the additional production cost of an extra dose is often negligible. The expenses are all for the overhead. In fact, after paying off initial capital costs, the price of the pills might drop to $100; so the more people we insure and treat, the faster we can start saving money. Kinsley's whole reductive way of thinking about these problems is ridiculous - if I understand him at all, which I'm not confident I do, because it's such a weirdly written piece.

I have a feeling I've seen Kinsley do this before - try to look at some complicated economic problem through the college-sophomore lens of adding up all the assets, dividing them out, and positing that whatever comes out must equal what goes in. Of course, real economic and social problems are vastly more complicated than that; what comes out almost never adds up to what went in. But what a totally weird thing for him to write - and at this moment...?

The FCC said an episode of the CBS crime drama "Without a Trace" that aired in December 2004 was indecent, citing the graphic depiction of "teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy."

CBS objected, saying the program "featured an important and socially relevant storyline warning parents to exercise greater supervision of their teenage children."

Regardless of our positions on freedom of speech as it relates to mindless commercial crap, can we all agree that this statement by CBS poisons the minds of young people by making them think it's okay to lie in pursuit of a buck, or to avoid facing legal consequences? Why can't they just say, "The program was intended to titillate viewers without stepping over the line of decency as we understood the FCC to have drawn it. We regret violating the standards, but would appreciate it if the FCC would draw the standards more clearly in advance so we don't end up in such situations again"?

Honestly, why do people in corporate America think it's okay to issue such transparent lies, so routinely? Do we Americans really think it's fine to lie to make your corporation look better? It doesn't even make the corporation look better - it's such a transparent lie, it only makes them look like a bunch of slimy weasels. This is what they ought to be fined for - for teaching kids that if you come home from a drinking party with a dent in the family car, you should tell your dad you got it swerving to avoid hitting a faun. The airwaves, as Edward R. Murrow was always reminding us, are a public trust.