So, have you heard about President Obama winning the Nobel Prize? If you'd suggested this to me yesterday, I wouldn't have believed it, let alone been able to put forth an argument for it, so I won't pretend it made intuitive sense when I woke up this morning.

I do think this prize makes more sense when you think about the nature of the Nobels for Peace, and for Literature, and understand how they work. If you think of the Nobels, or similar prizes, as straightforward and objective rewards for merit, then it seems obvious that Obama should continue paying his dues, and maybe the Middle East's dues, before it's his turn.

Of course, the Peace Prize, unlike the other Nobels, has never been about completed labors. It's not a gold watch for a retiree. They didn't wait for global warming to end to give the Prize to Gore. They didn't wait for Poland to free itself from Communism to give the Prize to Lech Walesa, who won in 1983. This is the twentieth anniversary of the 14th Dalai Lama winning the Prize; his homeland remains under Chinese rule. And the 1991 winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, is still under house arrest. The prize has always been for the struggles the recipient undertakes rather than the struggles they win. A prize that's about ending war forever has never been solely about results.

But the larger problem is that no award like the Nobel Peace Prize is or ever could be an objective recognition of merit. There is no way to assess the question objectively. (The Prize for Literature, like all arts prizes, faces the same question.) The Nobel Prize is not a box score. It is an action, taken by the committee.

That action does two things: it attempts to build up the prestige of the Prize itself, and it lends the Prize's accumulated prestige to the winners, as additional leverage in their struggles.

The first is less obvious, so I'll deal with it first, and save the second for another post. The Prize always seems to be a straightforward consecration of the winner by the Prize committee. But the Nobel, like any other prize, is only as prestigious as the list of previous winners make it. Sure, the Prize comes with 1.4 million dollars, and that's not hay. But if a bunch of rich donors started giving out a 3 million dollar prize ever year, and always ended up giving it to obscure state legislators with crank theories, the prize would never matter to anyone. The Nobel Peace Prize matters because Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther King and Theodore Roosevelt and George C. Marshall won it. Has it gone to the occasional dud? Sure. It's impossible to get it right every time. But part of the Prize Committee's business is choosing recipients who will sustain and increase the prize's luster. In the long run, it's Dr. King and President Roosevelt and the Dalai Lama who make the prize big, more than it's the other way around.

(This, very clearly, is how the Prize for Literature works. Even if it's been given to a few second-raters over the years, the fact that it's gone to Yeats and Faulkner and Garcia Marquez makes it virtually impossible to refuse. And understanding the prize decisions are based on the attempt to promote the Prize's own future prestige makes those decisions easier to understand.)

The Prize Committee didn't just give Obama something. They also attempted to attach themselves to him, to make his stature and charisma part of the Prize going forward. (Ask not what the Nobel can do for you ....) It's an investment decision, although the investment is in symbolic capital. The committee invested the Prize's authority in President Obama, speculating that over time his historical profile would make that authority grow.

Giving the sixth Peace Prize to Theodore Roosevelt was probably one of the smartest investments the Peace Prize Committee ever made, associating the prize with a charismatic international statesman and a rising world power. The previous winners had been pacifists and international activists: worthy people, but with nothing like Roosevelt's clout or stature. Giving Roosevelt the Prize changed its nature, and increased its influence.

The Prize Committee's decision can be understood as a sign that it wants to grab onto Obama's coattails, and more importantly to associate itself with the United States and its international power, just as the 1906 Prize Committee did. Clearly, the committee does not imagine the United States as a power in decline. Rather, they seem excited about America returning to a position of world leadership. Obama gets the prize, I suspect, for coming back to the world table as Chairman of the Board, a position that Bush abdicated.

American leadership, American international diplomacy, American power is in again, and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee wants to buy in early. I think that's the best news I, as an American, can have.

More thoughts in the next post.

Cross-posted at http://dagblog.com

A question that's been eating at me for a while:

Why do libertarians object to illegal immigrants?

Perhaps there are libertarians who do not, who extend their principles to encompass newcomers and their liberty to live and work where they please, without government interference. But my experience of libertarian pundits and of my own libertarian friends is that generally, they do not. The most anti-big-government libertarian of my friends also takes it as a given that illegal immigrants are a social ill.

Now, maybe some of these folks (my personal friend excepted, naturally) are merely using "libertarianism" as cover for another set of policy objectives. In that case, the explanation is that they're not sincerely libertarians. But what am I not grasping about the sincere ones?

If governments have no right to interfere in private economic activity and the pursuit of happiness, why can a government restrict the flow of labor from one place to another by erecting a border or, more intrusively still, by regulating how many immigrants are allowed to find jobs here? Immigration quotas don't seem to make any libertarian sense at all. And if not for the quotas, no one would be illegal. The "law" being broken is the law that government bureaucrats get to decided who can come in and who can't, while the government gets to set arbitrary numbers of immigrants from each group. ("Sorry, we've had all the Norwegians we can take for the year. Try us again in January.") The immigrants are only "illegal" because the very government authority that libertarians purport to despise labels those people as illegal.

Why shouldn't someone be able to get a job where there are jobs to be had? Why should someone be prevented from taking a job because too many other people from country X or Y have entered the country? (Talk about your identity politics....) Why shouldn't farmers be allowed to hire the people who want the harvest jobs? And why shouldn't an internet startup be free to hire a bunch of hotshots from IIT?

Seriously, I'd love any thoughts on this.

Crossposted at http://dagblog.com

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.

Representative Joe Wilson, of South Carolina, called the President of the United a liar tonight, while the President was in the House Chamber addressing a joint session of Congress. This isn't news to any of you; it was quite startling.

Shocking as this was, this wasn't the worst breach of civility a Congressman from South Carolina has ever committed. That dubious honor goes to his predecessor Preston Brooks.
I hereby nominate Congressman Wilson for the Preston Brooks Award, an irregular honor to be given to Members of Congress whose incivility undermines our civil institutions and the integrity of our public debate. May Wilson hold the award unchallenged for many years to come.

Preston Brooks, Congressman of South Carolina, walked into the Senate Chamber in 1856 and beat Senator Charles Sumner over the head with a cane. Sumner had to be carried from the chamber, unable to walk; he could not see because of the blood in his eyes; his desk was torn from its place on the floor when he took shelter under it. Brooks felt that Sumner had been discourteous in a floor speech, and beat Sumner because he felt the Senator had not been civil enough. Sumner was not well enough to resume his duties until 1859; the Massachusetts legislature actually returned Sumner to the Senate that time, because they felt that his empty chair in the Senate Chamber spoke more eloquently than any successor could do.

Brooks refused to apologize, survived an expulsion vote, resigned anyway (because he was affronted that anyone would impugn his character by voting for his expulsion) and was re-elected as a triumphant hero by his constituents. In the sectionalism leading up to the Civil War, Sumner was treated as a martyr in the north, and Brooks was lionized throughout the South. (There are towns named after him in Georgia and Florida.) And the Civil War came all the closer for it.

The beating was a sign of terrible sectarian division, and aggravated that division. But the partisan whooping and cheering that followed was a far worse sign, and in the long run even more corrosive. If the spirit of Preston Brooks moved another South Carolina Congressman tonight, in a small way, the question the rest of us have to ask is how we deal with it tomorrow. If all parties can agree that his behavior was out of place, then we're still having a healthy public debate. If, on the other hand, we see a backlash against criticism of Wilson, if the radio charlatans and cable shouting heads decide to defend him tomorrow, then it's a sign that out national discourse is fraying, and reasonable solutions are drifting further out of reach.

Charles Sumner's seat in the Senate Chamber stands empty again tonight. It is, of course, Senator Kennedy's seat. And tonight a sitting President ended his speech to both Houses and our nation by appealing to the eloquence of that empty chair, and of its sorely-missed occupant. There's poetry in that, but chance and history wrote the poem.

As galling as it is to discover flaws in anyone Glen Beck attacks, I'm not sorry that Van Jones resigned. Signing a petition that calls for "investigating" the truther conspiracy theories is actually a superb reason to not work in the White House. Van Jones shouldn't work in the White House. Neither should anyone who endorses the birther lunacy, even if it's just signing a petition they later deny believing in, should be allowed in any future Republican West Wing.

There's a feeling, I understand, that Glenn Beck shouldn't be allowed to "win." But what has Beck won? Advertising endorsements? No. Beck got someone who founded the group that's promoting his boycott. Maybe he feels some personal satisfaction. But the canning of Van Jones doesn't mean advertisers are signing back on to Beck's show. He's gotten some petty revenge. But he hasn't gained anything for himself.

Has the Jones resignation made Obama look bad, or weak? Only to people, whether on the left or right, who already thought Obama was bad and weak. Only the hardest-core political junkies noticed the Van Jones story at all, because the lunatic right stepped on the story. The opportunity to make Obama's White House looks like a truther loon sanctuary was cast aside in the giddy assault on Obama's dangerous socialist speech about studying hard.

We're actually in luck. The lunatic right overlooked the first nugget of genuine leftist irrationalism they'd happened across for months and months, because they were so eager to run out and prove themselves irrational and irresponsible. I rejoice at their timing.

We have to meet the crazies with sanity, not with more crazy, and it's important not to confuse political passion with political credulity. Being willing to believe any crazy silly thing doesn't make you a more passionate or more committed leftist. It makes you an undisciplined and ineffective leftist. In the long run, and too often in the short run, it makes you a liability.

Being the mirror image of the Rump Republican Party is not a strategy for victory. There is no advantage in adopting the opposition's folly and weakness. "If the enemy," as a character in Shakespeare puts it, "is an ass, and a fool, and a prating coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also ... be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb?" Being a truther is an attempt to match the right wing craziness with more craziness, like fighting kamikaze pilots by crashing your own plane.

We need to defeat the crazy right on the ground of cold hard, sanity. Keeping around truthers and other conspriacy theorists only muddies that crucial division between the party that wants to move the country forward in real ways that help real people and the party that is mired in its own fetid paranoias. We need to represent the reality-based community, all day every day. That's the only way to win and the only way to deserve to win.

And the plain unpleasant fact is, the left has no route to victory except virtue. Playing down and dirty in the swamps of paranoia and conspiracy will always be a losing strategy for progressives. Conservative fantasies and fear-mongering will always have a wider and deeper pull in the public imagination than progressive fantasies will; the conservative fantasies are deeply familiar and grounded in long cultural traditions; they come easily. Being progressive is precisely about doing the good that we have to imagine into being, the things we have to work to imagine. Imagining a better world is hard work. It's always easier to fall back into old, comfortable fears. We will never win by talking about the monsters under the voters' beds; the right wing midwived those monsters, long before we were born.

I've heard so much about socialism these days, and the word clearly doesn't mean what I think it means, or really what any of the dictionaries say it means. So what is this socialism that people keep accusing Obama of? What do the people who call him "socialist" mean by that?

Formal theoretical definitions aren't so much the way to go. So I'm going to start a purely descriptive list, cataloging the Obama policies that are labeled "socialist."

Let's start with "Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer, who this week called President Obama's planned speech to school children an attempt to 'indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda....'"

OK, so:

1) Socialists tell children to work hard and stay in school.

Got it.

I think there are a lot of socialists around these days. George H. W. Bush, you big Andover pinko, I'm looking at you.

(h/t Daily Kos)

There's already been a lot of virtual ink spilled about the Gates arrest, and now about the President calling the arrest stupid. As someone from a police family, I think that arrest was stupid. It was a glaring piece of bad judgment.

Even according to the arresting officer's report, this is very much a discretionary arrest. There are such things. If every law on the book was constantly enforced with arrest, we'd live in a bizarre and palpably unjust world. Every loiterer should not be fined. Everyone drunk in public should not spend a night in the drunk tank. Every piece of disorderly conduct should not lead to an arrest. Any time a police officer makes one of those arrests, he or she is using her discretion. It's a judgment call.

Should these laws be taken off the books? No. Do they give the police too much leeway? Not necessarily. Police need some tools to manage difficult situations in real time in the interest of public safety. The ability to arrest people, to remove certain parties from a situation that's looking volatile, is an absolutely necessary tool. If you've got some truculent drunks in a crowd after a sporting event, who are on the verge of starting a fight, public drunkenness is a great arrest to make. If you want to keep two large groups of teenagers from brawling, the no-loitering law is perfect. If someone is legitimately creating a public danger, disorderly conduct arrests can defuse the situation.

But here's the thing. Exactly because these arrests are discretionary, they put the burden on the police officer to use discretion and good judgment. These are laws that are basically designed not to be enforced most of the time. The point is that the officer is supposed to apply these laws judiciously, in the interest of public safety. A drunk twenty-something leaning on a designated driver's arm? Not an arrest. A drunk twenty-something screaming threats at a guy in a Yankees cap? Arrest-a-mundo.

Most of all, discretionary arrests should not be used by a police officer to vent spleen or avenge insults. They often are, but that is not policing. That is public bullying. Disorderly conduct should not be charged simply because someone displeased a police officer.

The arresting officer's report, which is by its nature a one-sided and adversarial document, can't really make the case that Gates had to be arrested. It only makes the case that Gates could be arrested. And for a disorderly conduct charge, that isn't enough. Any talk about how Gates comported himself is beside the point. Being a jackass, and we only have the arresting officer's word for that, is still not an arrestable offense. And as for the defense that Sgt. Crowley was "just doing his job," I would point out that his job is to use his discretion. He certainly wasn't protecting anyone when he arrested Gates. And he wasn't using his judgment. He was just being, to put it as charitably as possible, stupid.

I believe that Crowley knew from almost the beginning of the interview that Professor Gates was not a threat to him. The fact that Crowley entered Gates's home (as all parties agree) by himself and without backup, gives that away. If he went into that house without backup (especially when the initial report mentioned two suspects) before knowing that there was not a crime in progress, then he would be an enormous fool. That he walked into Gates's home alone suggests that he knew he was dealing with a safe situation.

After Gates had identified himself as the homeowner, and shown ID (which all parties agree, although they differ on details), and after, as Sgt. Crowley himself reports, Crowley believed that he was dealing with the legitimate resident, there was no further police work to do. (Certainly, he should not have continued to ask the resident questions after that. What reason could there be?) Crowley should have been on his way. Ideally, a few conciliatory words along the line of "Sorry to disturb, just doing our jobs," would have helped, but Crowley was also free to scowl and depart.

What happened next, with Gates being arrested and cuffed on his porch, has nothing to do with public safety. Even if Gates behaved every bit as badly as Crowley claims, Gates's vocal and arguably "disorderly" displeasure was not going to be a threat to anyone else's safety. There wasn't going to be any mayhem on Ware Street. I'm not entirely sure that the laws of physics permit mayhem on Ware Street in Cambridge. If Gates had genuinely lost his temper, then Crowley should have allowed him to sputter on his porch and embarrass himself. Instead Crowley reached for his cuffs and made everything into a bigger deal. Was that stupid? There's no way on Earth to call it smart. 

Ross Douthat has an equivocal defense of Sarah Palin, or rather a lyrical defense of the-Palin-that-might-have-been in Douthat's hopeful hypotheses, in the Times. He cops to the damage that Palin has done to herself and to her own political future, but also throws a lot of blame on the media for misrepresenting her. I disagree with Douthat broadly: I do not think that there is another Palin, or that she would have performed better in different circumstances. I think there's one Sarah Palin, here in the phenomenal world, and I think we're looking at her.

But I really want to take issue with a narrower point, about how Douthat frames Palin's agenda:

Palin's popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal -- that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal -- that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

That is genuinely a nice distinction on Douthat's part and the tension between small-d democratic impulses and meritocratic impulses go all the way back through our history. (Part of my Independence Day reading has involved the election of 1800; 'nuff said.) But Douthat is collapsing another important distinction: that between hostility toward class and hostility toward education per se.

One can dislike Harvard and Columbia for class-based reasons, as bastions of elitism, and that's an eminently reasonable position, even for Harvard alumni with columns at the New York Times. But some dislike Harvard, Columbia, and the rest of the Ivies because they dislike education itself. There's an anti-elitist position and a know-nothing position. One has merit. One does not. Richard Nixon might legitimately scorn Harvard, where he could not afford to go although he earned admission. But Nixon never scorned learning itself. Lincoln, the greatest of our up-by-the-bootstraps politicians, valued education tremendously.

The question here is whether Palin is the class warrior Douthat imagines or a simpler, less laudable, know-nothing . Douthat feels that she's a failed or incompetent Andrew Jackson:

he's botched an essential democratic role -- the ordinary citizen who takes on the elites, the up-by-your-bootstraps role embodied by politicians from Andrew Jackson down to Harry Truman.

But perhaps she's "botched" this role because she's not trying to perform it. Perhaps she isn't fumbling Douthat's agenda, but has one of her own that Douthat himself could not embrace.

It's very clear from her public words and actions that Palin does not merely resent educational privilege, but education itself. She resents knowledge. She resents learning. She resents anyone who is smarter than herself, which is a very significant slice of humanity. Palin doesn't simply view Harvard and Columbia as elitist; she views state colleges as elitist. She's against knowing stuff.

How can we test this? We could look at her education policy. How does she support the University of Alaska system? Surely, the University of Alaska is not about eastern snobbery or old-money prestige. It's about students learning things.

And while we're at it, we should consider, as the best evidence of all, Palin's hostility to public libraries in her state. Public libraries are anti-elitist education at its purest and best. They give no degrees. They have no cachet. They have no lacrosse teams or school ties. They're just about information, about learning for everyone. They are the places where many of our greatest American autodidacts, and there's a glorious tradition, have begun to pull themselves up by the public bookplates.

Palin, naturally, hates them.

I was pleased by President Obama's speech in Cairo today. Many of the things I'd praise about the speech, which had many fine moments, will be praised elsewhere, so I'll confine myself to one detail of its purpose and of the expectations about it.

I've already seen some reaction from fairly hard-line Islamist figures rejecting Obama's gestures of reconciliation and mutuality. I have also seen some reaction that is surprised by that rejection, despite how deeply unsurprising it is, and even reaction implying that Obama's outreach has failed, and that his approach was "naive," and so forth.

The leader of Hamas isn't buying what Obama's selling? Of course not. He's the leader of Hamas. No speech was going to change his mind. And Obama knows it. The speech is not meant to do that.

Yes, the speech presents itself as an invitation to a new beginning of cooperation, and on some level it is. But Obama knows that anti-Americanism won't vanish overnight and be replaced by a new pro-American attitude. That is his stated aspiration, not his genuine rhetorical goal. And anyone who expects him to magically convert all of America's bitterest enemies into allies tomorrow is being naive.

The speech is a beginning: the beginning of a debate. The goal of Obama's address was not to win over America's enemies through his personal eloquence. The goal was to put America's enemies in the Islamic world at a disadvantage in their argument with America's supporters. The leadership of Hamas might come around someday, at least in part, but only in response to political realities on the ground, because other groups are gaining traction against them. Obama wants to lend their opponents some rhetorical traction. Obama is not going to win the hearts or minds of Hamas or Hezbollah. But he might put Muslims who share America's goals in a better position to win their own political battles with Hezbollah.

This is a version of what Andrew Sullivan calls Obama's "rope-a-dope" strategy. Obama reaches out an eminently reasonable and conciliatory hand to his opponents, they slap it away, and they make themselves look petty and unreasonable in the process. He's done it to the Republicans over and over again. Now he's done it to hard-liners in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and it's their turn to look bad. Yes, some hard-liners have already denounced Obama's speech. Obama's not interested in them. He's interested in peeling away their supporters. And he doesn't need to do all of the peeling today. This is the fabled Obama long game.

Obama chose to tell some unpopular truths to his audience, and he had a lot of good reasons. It burnished his credibility, as someone who was talking to the Islamic world honestly about the difficult things. It gave listeners a solid outlines of the points that weren't negotiable (with the unstated reminder that the Muslim world will never get a more sympathetic President of the United States, and are looking at the best deal they can expect). But just as importantly, it gave anti-American Islamists a list of talking points that are probably untenable. Obama pushed back on Holocaust denial and calls for Israel's utter destruction, which are real and toxic positions that have to be engaged. But Obama set up the engagements on his terms. If America's opponents want to put all of their chips down on Holocaust denial fantasies, I suspect Obama is looking forward to accepting that bet.

Yes this is a beginning. It's the beginning of an intense argument, in the Muslim world, about Obama and his speech. That argument will be won and lost by Muslims themselves, and not by Obama or any other Westerner, and it has already begun. But Obama has chosen the grounds for the debate, and he's given his supporters the best advantage he could.

The response to Dr. George Tiller's death has made me nearly as angry, and more shocked, than even the murder itself made me. It is appalling to see any public figure, no matter how foolish and corrupt, equivocate by condemning a murder but calling the victim of that murder a "monster." It is disgusting to read Megan McArdle's double-voiced paean to vigilantism, which compares the killer's victim to a Nazi, or William Saletan's bankrupt and sophomoric exercise in moral equivalency. Everyone, or almost everyone, makes a token acknowledgment that murder is still a crime, and purports to disapprove. But with that brief obligation dispensed, people evidently feel free to vilify the dead man, the victim of the crime, in the most grotesque and slanderous way, comparing him to Josef Mengele or Pol Pot. The vile O'Reilly actually delivers his pro forma denunciation in a transparently insincere voice, signaling that while "Kansas law" allows what Tiller did, O'Reilly has nothing but contempt for that law. Then he proceeds, much more warmly, to repeat his libelous smears on Tiller. Then O'Reilly complains of unfair treatment by his critics. Someone has been murdered in a church, and O'Reilly claims that he, O'Reilly, is the victim.

I've never really believed in the decline of our civilization until now. What could be more barbarous, less humane, less civil?

Beyond the indecency of speaking this way while Tiller's widow and family are still grieving, and beyond the rank dishonesty of the smears against him, it is shocking to hear people continue the very demonization that got the man murdered in the first place. Dr.Tiller is discussed, even in his death, as a monster, as someone whose motives are incomprehensibly malevolent, as someone who should not be imagined as real or human. They mouth pious regret for his death, but do their best to erase the life he actually led from the public memory.

Worst of all, they complain about being held accountable for the inflammatory rhetoric that made the crime seem possible, and then sensible, and finally even laudable, to the deranged gunman. They compare a man to genocidal tyrants, and when he is killed they compare him to genocidal tyrants again, and they are shocked, shocked, that anyone would suggest they ought to have spoken differently.

O'Reilly presents, essentially, the Louis Farrakhan defense: He's not responsible for Malcolm X's murder, and should not be blamed for it simply because he was publicly preaching that the Malcolm should be killed. Farrakhan felt he was being unjustly persecuted, too.

O'Reilly, and the other pro-lifers who complain that they are being viewed unfairly, are wrong. They are not being unfairly blamed. They are free from criminal penalty, and from civil suit, because they did not participate in the crime itself. They are free from any censorship of their speech, even their intemperate speech, because they did not explicitly urge the murder. The freedom with which they trash and defile Tiller's memory proves how far from any real fear of censorship they are.

The essence of their position is that it is unfair for others to judge their speech. They will be permitted to say whatever they like, however dishonest or intemperate, however likely to encourage the violent fringe. But it is unfair for listeners to make a judgment about their honesty, their temper, their morals or their wisdom. For the rest of us to listen to them and decide for ourselves is, apparently, a violation of their freedom. Accusing people of murder and comparing them to Hitler is an exercise of their rights. Calling them dangerous demagogues for saying those things is a violation of their rights.

O'Reilly and Carlson and the leaders of Operation Rescue should not be punished by law, or  by censorship. But they should be blamed. They have earned an enormous amount of blame. They are free to pose as moral authorities; the rest of us are not obligated to believe it. They can say whatever horrible and morally depraved things they please. But no one has to pretend to like it.

This morning I hit upon a strategy for reading the unceasing supply of news articles in which bailout-dependent bankers grumble about the profound injustice of having to live on their salaries after bringing Western civilization to the brink of economic ruin.

I read the bankers' complaints in the voice of Elmo from Sesame Street.

Am I proud of this? No. But it's the only way I can read this nonsense without biting the furniture. And I find it matches the tone and content of the welfare-bankers complaints quite well:

"Elmo not be able to live on 75,000 dollars a year! Elmo have mortgage on summer house! Because New York dirty!"

It's childish, naturally, and stupid. I can't actually recommend that you do the same thing. But it does get me through the day.

One day I was sitting in an airport terminal, waiting for a flight, while another passenger stood at the window with her daughter, trying to show her the airplane we were about to board. But the little girl couldn't see it. See could see the fueling trucks on the tarmac, she could see the baggage carts and the airport staff on the ground. But she couldn't see the airplane itself.

"Where's the plane?" the little girl kept asking. "Where's the plane?"

The problem was scale. The child couldn't recognize the shape of the aircraft standing there in plain view, because she was looking for a much smaller shape. She simply didn't have any precedent, or any cognitive model, for an object of the size she was looking at, so she couldn't connect the sight of metal or paint or tire rubber into the larger outline of the plane. She didn't link the bits she was seeing into a picture of the whole because she didn't expect and couldn't imagine that such a whole might exist.

Lately I've been thinking about that little girl every day. She's a good illustration of how we process information, as human beings, and of how difficult the big and unexpected can be to process. When confronted with something too large and too strange, we can fail to apprehend it at all.

Most of our handling of the financial crisis boils down to one real question: who has seen the plane yet, and who has not? There have been furious daily stories in the news about this or that detail of the large, terrible shape overshadowing us. But it becomes increasingly clear in each day's news that most of the players, and certainly most of the journalists, haven't managed to perceive that shape, or even its shadow.

A CEO of a major bailed-out institution who can not only defend exorbitant employee compensation but get self-righteous about those employee's deserts has not seen the plane yet. CNBC pundits trying to defend their own performance and scapegoat others have not seen the plane. Congressmen who obsess about spending cuts or even spending freezes during a massive economic contraction really have not seen the plane. It's not simply denial, although there is a measure of that. It's a basic and all-too-normal failure to apprehend the largest and most important part of the landscape, precisely because it is so incredibly large.

Most people, with the normal human mix of benign and selfish intentions, are trying to keep doing the things that worked for them, and even seemed virtuous to them, before the situation changed, because they haven't yet grasped that this is a new, and very different situation. There need not always be a Goldman Sachs; entitlement spending is not the biggest fiscal challenge the nation faces at the moment; CNBC's business model is not necessarily viable any more. It takes a certain amount of time to grasp fundamental change, perhaps especially for the experts who are trained to deal with intricate details of a large and commonly-understood model. It takes longer to see the plane if you're trained at analyzing tire treads, and you're looking for a car. And once you've seen the plane, you have to begin the long, difficult process of thinking about what it means.

It's very clear from his banking plan that Tim Geithner, for all his expertise, has yet to see the plane. Barack Obama has not seen it clearly either. That's not good at all. Obama planned his campaign, and his administration, for a different set of problems. And like most of the other key players, what Obama tends to say is what Obama tended to say before the crisis. The economic plan that he recommends is the plan he stumped on in the primaries. That's not dishonesty or stupidity: it's simply a sign of not yet having taken on board the basic facts of the new environment.

Obama, to be fair, could not have been elected already seeing the plane; the plane only came into view a few months before the election, and anyone who had been predicting a crisis such as this earlier would not have been able to achieve the nomination. (You can't win a broad-based election based on priorities that the vast majority of the country does not share.) His success or failure will not be linked to his foresight, but to his adaptability. The question isn't whether Obama has a plan. Any plan he might have would be based on assumptions that aren't viable any more. The question is how quickly he realizes he needs to throw the plan away, and think of something new.

The child never did spot the airplane that day. She wasn't ready yet. But she had to ride in its belly, just the same. And so do we.

Jonathan Chait has a nice post at The New Republic about McCain's shallow, twittering mockery of various bits of budgetary pork, and about Maureen Dowd's witless applause of McCain. As Chait points out, McCain's "method" is to pick anything that can be made to sound silly. Dowd, of course, applauds this method as the height of wisdom.

In the list of "silly" projects McCain scorns is this: