A quick (and true) parable from history: in 1189, Richard the Lion-Hearted decided that no Jews would be allowed at his coronation ceremony. When some leading London Jews showed up at the door, they were turned away, and when the gathered crowd saw this they concluded that the new King was solidly anti-Semitic and that the best way to celebrate would be to murder as many Jews as possible. Mobs killed almost sixty people and set the city's Jewish ghetto, the Jewry, on fire.

Of course, 12th-century London was mostly made of wood. It is impossible to burn only one neighborhood in a wooden city, and before morning a decent sized chunk of the city was on fire, too.

I think about that story from time to time, and more often lately, because it's a story about how uncontrollable civil violence becomes. You cannot burn one neighborhood and not the adjoining neighborhoods. You cannot start a fire and give it a list of people it should burn or not burn. Once it starts it is outside of your control. Political violence works the same way, through a political version of the same physics: once it starts it is difficult to stop. It spreads rapidly and unpredictably. It is in no one's control. It claims victims on every side, and innocent bystanders too. Everybody lives in a wooden city.

There has never been left-wing violence without right-wing violence in this country, never right-wing violence without left-wing violence. There was abolitionist violence as well as pro-slavery violence, anarchist violence and authoritarian violence, anti-civil-rights and pro-civil rights violence. You can't read the history of Bleeding Kansas honestly and divide the killers from the martyrs along ideological lines. They go together. And once the violence begins, the violent make common cause against the rest of us, prolonging and intensifying the bloodletting as much as they can.

Am I saying that the violence was equal on both sides? No, and I am not the least bit interested in going through the box scores of old massacres. Am I positing moral equivalence for people on either side of these historical debates? No, because it's irrelevant. The fire doesn't care who's right. Am I ignoring who started the bloodshed in which case? Yes, I am, and so should you, because once the fire starts it's going to burn the just and unjust alike. The question is not who started it, but how to keep it from starting.

There is one civil peace, a single domestic tranquility, which protects us all. It is easy to disrupt and hard to restore. When it is disrupted, no one is safe. Every act of left-wing violence endangers people of the left. Every act of right-wing violence endangers people of the right. There is no safety but public safety.

The air in this country has been thick with inflammatory words since before the last election. It leaves an odor in the air, like gasoline soaking into rags. And when public figures speak of caution, some take that as partisan, or even as a provocation. That response strikes me as eerily disconnected from reality. The civil peace protects all equally, and if your political opponents want to preserve it, you should help them.

Still worse is keeping a selective list of partisan grievances, reciting a litany of all the horrible things the other side has done to your side lately while discounting the behavior of your own lunatic fringe. This accusatory stance can only hasten conflict, and never help to avoid it. And why does it matter if the "other side" has left more oily rags on the floor than your side? The question is how many oily rags pile up, not who does the piling, and you can only reduce the pile by reducing your own share of it. Throwing down more rags because "they" left even more is just self-destructive.

And discounting crimes against one's ideological opponents because the criminal was a lunatic or a loose cannon or not a "real" member of your movement is simply weak. The violent always come from the deranged and fanatical and weak-minded, especially during the build-up to a conflict. The fact that Abraham Lincoln didn't personally murder anybody in Kansas didn't calm anything down. Your side doesn't get to use the "just a nutjob" excuse because the other side's nutjobs won't honor it.

Progressive bloggers can discount the freak who bit off that tea-bagger's finger (!) and the freak who killed the poor demonstrator with the pro-life sign, claiming they "don't count," but there are people who are carrying around real or virtual press clippings of those events, building up their rage and justifying future acts of violence. They are counting those people. Conservative bloggers can claim that neo-Nazis like the one who shot up the Holocaust Museum "don't count" as conservatives, but the leftists most likely to commit atrocities count him. Every one of these people leaves another oily rag on our collective floor. Saying that we didn't put it there, and aren't responsible for removing it, is no help.

Civil violence is a lowest-common-denominator thing. The addled and hopeless are disproportionately attracted to it, and they are the primary audience for provocations. When a politician speaks in a way that reasonable people would only take as hyperbole or gamesmanship, that's not enough. What matters is how your speech is misunderstood.

Does it matter whether or not public figures intend to provoke violence? Well, to go back to my original story, Richard the Lion-Hearted never intended to start a pogrom. Of course not. He was an anti-Semite, but certainly didn't want any anti-Semitic bloodshed inside his kingdom. He was actually furious (he needed England's Jews to help finance his crusade), and did his best to stop the violence. But he could not. It spread to other towns and cities: to Norwich, to Lynn, to York. What Richard intended was not the point.

Dozens died in some towns. Hundreds died in York. It went on for months, well into the spring of 1190, like fire carried on a dry wind.

crossposted at http://dagblog.com

Megan McArdle finds it funny that Nancy Pelosi is worried about political violence. I'm not sure which element tickles McArdle's funny bone. Maybe it's Pelosi's request that public officials speak responsibly. Maybe it's Pelosi's embarrassing and uncool emotional sincerity. Perhaps it's that Pelosi is soooo amazingly old that she actually remembers the Mayor of San Francisco's thigh-slappingly funny murder. (Can you imagine being that old? Silly grandma!)

McArdle has titled her comic response "There Will Be Blood," thereby establishing her credentials for highly literate snark. It follows in its entirety:

I'm not sure what Nancy Pelosi is trying to say in this video. Is she furthering the largely unsubstantiated claim that the American right is planning a reign of terror? Or is she trying to tell us that Owosso was just the beginning? Either way, this doesn't seem like it's adding much to the national conversation.

McArdle does have a remarkable talent for crowding slippery debating tactics into a limited space, a kind of spin doctor's haiku. In four sentences she's got at least two straw men, some misleading rhetorical questions, an appeal to moral equivalence: a post like this requires one an elaborate and unwholesome genius. There isn't time enough in the world to deal with every one of McArdle's pithy distortions, but I'd note the two biggest ones. First she treats Pelosi's worry about unbalanced people taking political rhetoric too seriously as a conspiracy theory about an organized "reign of terror" by "the right" as a whole. Easy to refute that one, isn't it, Megan? (That McArdle considers her own fantastic straw man only "largely unsubstantiated" is rather chilling.)

McArdle's second big move is the your-side-does-it-too riposte, familiar from school yards, street corners and protracted civil wars the world over. By bringing up the murder of a pro-life activist in Owosso, McArdle implies that it is really the liberals who are killing the conservatives, or that both sides are equally violent, or some other idea which McArdle seems to think wins her a debating point.

Of course, Pelosi did not denounce violence by the right. She denounced violence, full stop:

I wish we would all curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements and understand that some of the ears that it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statements might assume.

Pelosi's appeal to responsible speech, explicitly aimed at a universalized "we" than any specific or partisan "they," warning that overheated rhetoric can be misunderstood by the unbalanced, has immediately been taken by the conservative media as an unjust accusation against conservatives. That response speaks like a thunderclap. When saying things that excitable lunatics might misunderstand feels like a core value of your movement, your movement should disband.

In McArdle's world, of course, there is no such thing as a non-partisan statement. Pelosi says "we" and McArdle hears "you." McArdle's snark about Owosso presumes that Pelosi would not be bothered by the senseless murder of a protester on the right. But Pelosi said no such thing; it is McArdle who cannot imagine anyone mourning violence against an ideological opposite.

The question of violence has been on McArdle's mind intermittently over the last few months, including her repeated defense of people bringing guns to Obama speeches, and her thought experiment about the moral coherence of murdering abortion providers:

Now I can move onto the observation that if you actually think late-term abortion is murder, then the murder of Dr. Tiller makes total sense.

Of course, McArdle never explicitly advocates murder. She identifies herself as pro-choice. She calls bringing guns to public events "counterproductive." McArdle merely urges us to accept murder as reasonable. Not that she would ever do such a thing, of course. She simply demands that people who would, and people who have, be treated as serious contributors to the public debate. In McArdle's world brandishing a weapon, or even using that weapon to kill another human being, should not discredit one's beliefs.

This strange fixation on McArdle's part, her crusade make sure the armed and even the violent are not penalized in the public debate, helps explain her hostility to Pelosi. An appeal for responsible speech, for considering the consequences of one's words, is anathema to McArdle; she seems to believe that ideas must always be judged upon their abstract and intrinsic merits, rather than on their material consequences, and still less on the behavior of their adherents. It would offend McArdle heartily if an idea that seemed to her logical and consistent were discredited simply because its advocates were violent or anti-social. She demands that ideas be judged only as ideas, and for McArdle an idea doesn't become any less true, beautiful or good just because someone who believes in it kills someone who didn't.

Thus Pelosi's obvious emotion, the tears that unexpectedly started welling when she recalled the bloody deaths of people she had known and worked with, evidently struck McArdle as tasteless or ridiculous. That sort of thing, as Jay Gastby put it, is "only personal." And that Pelosi appealed to her own lived experience must have struck McArdle, for whom politics is a long series of seminar-room hypotheticals, as uncouth. McArdle values being "contrarian," by which she means offering logically valid arguments with surprising conclusions; these conclusions are often surprising because they are at odds with the experience of living in the world. McArdle doesn't view guns at public assemblies as dangerous, because for her guns are primarily ideas. And whether or not guns are dangerous is a question to resolve with a syllogism, before moving on to another observation.

Movement conservatives have been working hard since 1980 to build their presence on college campuses, and groom a new generation of conservative thinkers and pundits. McArdle is one of the fruits of their success: focused on winning adversarial debates, favoring abstract logic over experience and snark over sobriety, not only thriving on a polarized atmosphere but insisting on one. McArdle still argues in the ad hoc style of dorm rooms and dining halls: facile, punchy, never overly burdened by research. She is bright. But her intelligence is focused on winning games. When someone gestures to something bigger than the partisan game, she can only hear a play for partisan advantage. When Nancy Pelosi talks about avoiding violence, McArdle can only understand that as a ploy. McArdle is so blinkered cannot imagine that avoiding civil bloodshed might be valuable to people on both sides of the aisle. She cannot see what is in it for her. Megan McArdle is still a sophomore, in the most literal meaning of the word: a bright and highly-educated fool.

crossposted at http://dagblog.com

Yesterday Meet the Press ended with an attempt to discuss the economy; calling it an actual discussion of the economy might be going a bit too far. The participants did manage to conclude that ten percent unemployment is A Big Deal (although they were preoccupied with using it to handicap political horse races), and they stumbled around the notion that we are in the middle of huge economic changes. But how far the chattering classes are from any real grasp of the world economy is illustrated by one quote from Joshua Cooper Ramo, who has a story about unemployment in Time:

"Last week we had the dubious honor of passing Europe in terms of unemployment, which has, you know, long been sort of the pride of the United States; well, at least we're not Europe."

The jingoism of that sentence originally distracted me from the truly shocking phrase, "at least." Ramo evidently believes, and assumes everyone else believes, that the United States economy has been eclipsed by economic rivals, but at least we have stodgy old socialist Europe to look down on.

The assumption here is that America is losing out to the more dynamic developing economies of the Pacific Rim, especially China's. It's become an article of faith among the financial press that America cannot compete with the less-regulated Asian economies and their lower labor costs. But the European Union, with its highly-paid workers, elaborate government regulation, and generous national entitlement programs, is imagined as far too handicapped to compete with the United States. China is imagined as the United States' prime economic rival and also as a model for imitation; Europe is imagined as an ineffective rival, and as a model to be avoided.

Like many long-standing assumptions, this one has gone unexamined well after reality began to contradict it. When the German automaker Daimler buys Chrysler, and later sells it off again as a bad deal, the words "at least we're not Europe" don't strike me as overwhelmingly persuasive. When the Euro climbs relative to the dollar, and the contrast between the exchange rate at the beginning and the end of the Bush Administration is dismaying, the presumption of American superiority seems quite shaky. I don't suggest either of those facts represents the whole economic picture, and I'm sure the American economy still outperforms the European in a number of ways, but the treating Europe as destined to be second-best forever is an enormous mistake. If the Big Three automakers can't compete because Western workers cost too much, how do you explain Daimler? If higher taxes and social programs handicap the EU's economy, are they weathering the recession as well as we are, or better?

While China is a very real economic rival, with whom the States will have to both compete and cooperate, Europe is also an economic superpower which, over the long term, represents a more direct competitive threat to the United States. Its economy is more analogous to ours and it competes to fulfill the same economic roles that the United States does. Moreover, it represents a far more useful potential model for the United States than China does. China's economic situation is so radically unlike our own that it's hard to draw any broadly-applicable lessons from it, while the European Union represents a different approach to managing an economy broadly like our own.

China is not simply America without a Food and Drug Administration. It is a huge country building a serious industrial base for the first time, as we did in the 19th century, and its rapid growth is the result of that structural change. We cannot follow that model because we've followed it already. We are not going to transform our economy by taking millions of farm laborers from the countryside and turning them into factory workers. There are actually not that many American farmers left. We are not going to build a transportation infrastructure in a country that doesn't have one; we can only upgrade the one we started building in the 19th century. We are not going to build an industrial base from scratch; we did that already, too. We have opportunities for economic growth, but not the kind of growth that took us from horses and sails to trucks and planes. That kind of transformation only happens once.

Americans who propose China as a model for development are essentially nostalgic; it is a proposal to repeat our own industrial past. But industrial development cannot be repeated in that way; the circumstances and opportunities are different now. We can be a better economy, but we cannot go back and become a newer economy, as China is.

The European Union represents a mature developed economy like our own, already industrialized, with modern transportation, modern financing, and a modern workforce. Indeed, Europe has, if anything, an older economy than ours, and represents a possible future (albeit not the only one) rather than a glorified past. In the European model, obviously, there is far more social spending than in the United States, and a far greater socialization of worker benefits. In the current American version of classical economics, this should hamper Europe's economic growth. But in some ways it also removes the burden of labor costs, and especially the burdens of medical and retirement spending, from individual employers, and allows more mobility in the workforce and more flexibility for employers.

Because European governments provide a greater share of workers' expensive benefits, individual businesses shoulder less of those costs. Every business pays steeper taxes, but large firms do not face massive legacy costs associated the workers of a previous generation, and startups or small businesses do not face prohibitive costs because they must provide health insurance for each new employee. Meanwhile, European workers, complacent and secure as they may be, are free to move to the highest-paying job they can find, and thereby to the sector of the economy where they create the most economic value. American autoworkers have to hold on to their automaking jobs as long as they can, even if the economy has too many autoworkers, because if they change jobs they lose their health insurance. A factory worker who wants to quit and start a small business will either find the capital she's saved devoured by the price of her own insurance, or go uninsured and face financial catastrophe if she falls ill. A European factory worker who thinks she could do better starting a cafe will get more of a shot to do it, and if the cafe fails she can rejoin the workforce without worrying about going uninsured for the rest of her life.

Does the European model have drawbacks? Yes. But we can no longer afford not to weigh those drawbacks against its advantages. And if we pretend to ourselves that their system cannot possibly compete with ours, even though that system is already competing with us and having real success, one day we may find one that we're no longer worried about falling behind Europe. We'll be worried about catching up.


Cross-posted at http://dagblog.com/, where I'm going to be guest-blogging starting today.