We're always told that economics is a complicated science, which is true, but also that bottom-line practical economics is very simple. But the simple rules we've all learned seem to have landed us into an incomprehensible mess. Let me try to recap what's happened.

Obviously, every business needs to make a profit to survive. This is done by keeping costs lower than revenues. If you're selling something, you need to make more money selling it than you spend in making or buying the product and in paying your workers.

What every business would like to do is to spend as little as possible without cutting revenues. This makes sense. And for the last thirty years, the most popular way of keeping costs down has been to keep labor costs down. The fewer people you pay, and the less you pay for them (counting wages, benefits, and payroll taxes), the more profit you can make. This also makes sense. Every business owner wants to keep pay down and profits up.

Now, here's the problem. If you pay your employees less than all of your competitors do, but charge equivalent (or slightly lower) prices, you will make more money than all of your competitors. If you could spend 10% or 20% less on your workers than everyone else in the market spent on equivalent workers, you'd have a winning strategy. However, at this point everyone who's gone to business school for even a semester, and many people who haven't, have all been taught that the key to succeeding in business is keeping costs down. So nearly everyone is trying to keep pay as low as possible.

This becomes a big problem because ultimately the employees (not just your employees but all of the economy's employees combined) are also the bulk of the consumers in the economy. If you pay Bob Cratchit only two-thirds of the going wage, but everyone else pays their Cratchits the full wage, you will be on the cover of Forbes. But if everyone pays their Cratchits two-thirds pay, suddenly there will be a lot less money out there for people to spend on buying your patented Scrooge-o-matic this Christmas. And then your business is in trouble. You could just fire a few Cratchits to keep your profit margin up, but if everyone's firing Cratchits then there will be even fewer people buying Scrooge-o-matics. It's a classic game-theory trap.

The problem is that reducing overall employee pay (either by cutting their wages or cutting taxes and benefits that employees will have to make up out of their wages) reduces overall consumer buying power. There are some classic ways to reduce (if not avoid) the problem of reducing consumer buying power.

The first is by increasing your national economy's exports, so that you get revenue from customers outside your own workforce. The United States has actually gone the opposite route, importing more and exporting less, so that makes the problem worse.

You can innovate in ways that allow you to produce higher-priced goods with lower overhead even when you hold employee pay more or less stable. We have done some of this, but it's a marginal benefit, and it's likely been overstated. Technological innovation has helped stave off the moment of crisis when the customers run out of money, but not much faster than the trade deficit has been hurrying that crisis toward us.

And finally, you can count on consumption by the very rich to make up for the loss of the employees' buying power. This is the "trickle-down" theory, which proposes that making the top spenders in the economy even richer, even at the expense of the lower, middle, and upper-middle spenders, will eventually help everyone. And it's true that the consumption of the very wealthy is consumption and helps as far as it goes. But the question is whether Mr. Scrooge's increased consumption when he has ten times the money in his pockets offsets the loss of consumption from a large number of Cratchits that he's fired. The result of our current real world experiment seems to be "Not even close."

So at some point, the United States economy will reach a point when the ongoing reduction in worker pay has damaged the consumers' overall buying power so badly that people can't buy anything and businesses can't make any profit. When will we hit that point? About twenty years ago. Maybe twenty-five years ago, maybe fifteen, it's hard to say. But certainly that crisis point, when it was time to turn the ship around and plot a new course, is already many years in our past.

When American businesses neared the point where the customers run out of money, they took very careful steps to postpone that crisis without fixing the underlying problems. By that point, the principle that pay should be kept low was already fixed in business's mind as an immutable and nearly moral law. (In fact, the compensation-cutting has only accelerated over the last decade or two.) So the question was how to shore up consumers' overall buying power even while cutting their overall pay.

There were two basic short-term fixes that disguised the problems and solved them in the short term while making them worse in the long run. The first was to cut prices on lower- and middle-end consumer goods by producing them overseas and retailing them in discount chains such as Wal-Mart. People who worked for a living were making less money, but many things were cheaper, so it felt like they were more or less keeping pace. This solution seemed to work for a while, but it cuts prices by cutting pay even faster, moving manufacturing jobs offshore and cutting wages for retail sales people (like Wal-Mart's employees) as far as they could be cut. So the first part of the strategy eventually undermines itself, and ultimately makes the economy's basic problem worse by cutting the consumers' buying power even deeper.

The other short-term fix was to loosen consumer credit by an unprecedented amount and make up for the lost real buying power by allowing consumers to rack up debt. This also papered over the problem for a while. Even if consumers had less money, they felt like they had money, and more importantly from business's point of view they spent that money. Meanwhile, business (in the aggregate) made even more profit off the consumers, by charging interest on that debt. Profits grew even higher, but the consumers' real long-term buying power was cut even further by the unprecedented amount of and unprecedented interest rates on that consumer debt. All of those credit cards kept the economy's wheels turning much longer than the actual fundamentals of the economy would allow, but left it in a much, much deeper hole. It's fashionable in some quarters to blame the economic downturn on the spendthrifts with the credit cards, but this misses the larger point: American business as a whole extended ridiculous amounts of credit for nearly twenty years, far in excess of borrowers' overall ability to repay, in an attempt to maintain unrealistically high corporate profits. American businesses essentially put the whole economy on Mastercard.

Now, of course, things are much much worse than they would have been twenty or so years ago. That was when we reached the point where depressing wages begins to depress consumers' buying power and hurt profits. Now, enabled by two decades of smoke and mirrors, we've gotten a long way below that point. Why would the American business community conspire against their own long-term economic future in this way?

The answer is supply-side economics, which basically teaches that the most important thing for economic growth is the availability of capital for investment. (It is absolutely true that an economy without enough investment capital will do poorly. There needs to be enough capital to start new businesses and expand existing ones.) Therefore, the key to building the economy is imagined as business profits which can be re-invested. Supply-side, at least in the crude popular form which actually gets put into practice, doesn't worry so much about the problem of demand. It proposes that if there is enough money to invest in a good business, the market will make that business a success, and people will buy the business's product or service. Where will the customers come from? Where will they get the money? The motto of supply-side is "If you build it, they will come." The problem is that they will come without money to buy anything.

The result of supply-side thinking is a focus on making the economy good for business profits, rather than for workers. (And of course, there is such a thing as an economy where pay's too high and profit's too low. But ideological supply-siders deny that profits could be too high or wages too low.) The focus has been on keeping costs down, and we've developed a whole set of beliefs and assumptions that go along with that idea. Everybody knows that taxes are bad for the economy, and everybody knows that unions are bad for the economy, because those things cut into employer profits and increase employee's earnings and buying power. But everybody's wrong; the economy was going like gangbusters in the heavily-unionized, relatively-high-taxed boom years of the Fifties and Sixties. And while there is such a thing as taxes being counter-productively high and union demands being unreasonable, unionized workers who can count on government benefits also make pretty good consumers, and the economy misses them when they're gone.

An implicit assumption of supply-side economics, at least as practiced by American policy-makers, is that there can never be too much capital available for investment. It imagines a smooth line on a graph, where the more capital there is the more the economy benefits, with no point of diminishing returns and certainly no point where the free capital becomes counterproductive. But this is demonstrably untrue. At a certain point, you get more capital than there are good investment opportunities for it, and then problems start. Ultimately, large piles of investment cash without enough real things to invest in lead to speculative bubbles. When average workers and consumers have too much cash for the amount of things that there are for them to buy, you get price inflation. When investors have too much cash for the amount of profitable enterprises that they could buy into, you get bubbles. Lots and lots of that accumulated capital gets put into investments that are unlikely to pay off, but the act of buying those ill-considered investments pushes their prices up, so they look like a huge profit opportunity, until eventually people are paying a million dollars for a tulip bulb and there's a crash. That's where the tech bubble and the resulting crash came from; that's where the housing bubble and the resulting crash came from. When the amount of profit going to the investor class becomes excessive, those big piles of cash basically start to set themselves on fire, and the fire spreads to the rest of the economy.

The problem we're in now is keeping a sufficient amount of investment capital available to build the economy back up, while restoring the buying power of the people who do most of the working and paying and living and dying around here. It's not an easy problem, but that's what the problem is.

Happy Labor Day, all!

cross-posted at Dagblog

I would like to see TPM's reader blogs continue. Given the concerns that Josh has raised, and taking them seriously whether everybody agrees with them or not:

1) How could we expand the size of the blogging community at TPM Cafe? What would be the best ways to attract new voices, to attract good voices, to keep good people blogging and to help the people who come here get better?

2) How could we best attract more readership to these blogs? How could the Cafe attract more overall traffic, from a wider readership?

3) Since the most obvious and natural source of new readers and bloggers is the readership of TPM's front page (no matter how any specific blogger might be feeling about that front page this week), what are the best ways to draw from that stream of traffic?

President Obama's response to crazy conspiracy narratives about him is predictable and cool. He doesn't want to wade into the nonsense, and in that much he's absolutely right: you can't argue people out of their irrational beliefs. And in general, Obama has put his faith in the public's preference for real-world results over conspiracy theories.

"I trust ... the American people's capacity to get beyond all this nonsense and focus on, 'Is this somebody who cares about me and cares about my family and has a vision for the future?' " Mr. Obama said. "And so, I will always put my money on the American people."

Obama is right. Americans prefer results over crazy mumbo-jumbo. And that's why Obama's in trouble.

If Obama's going to overcome the nutty mumbo-jumbo with practical results, he needs an actual plan that will lead to practical results. Reason trumps fantasy by bringing home the groceries at the end of the day. If all reason has to offer every day is yet another sensible, pragmatic explanation for why the cupboard is still bare, fantasy starts to look like the only game in town.

The various strands of right-wing lunacy over the last two years, the birther conspiracies and "secret Muslim" fantasies, the scapegoating and hatemongering and Glenn Beck's chalkboard and the recent Palingenetic "Rebirth of a Nation" rhetoric (h/t Digby) are all just various kinds of magical thinking: attempts to deal with overwhelming or insoluble realities through acts of belief. Can't deal with the fact the President of the United States is black? Believe that there is a piece of paper somewhere, a secret document, that will undo the election. (The giveaway with the birthers is that they don't demand that Biden be sworn in, but fantasize about overturning the last Presidential election entirely and getting rid of the Democrats.) Can't cope with the rubble of our economy? Blame a conspiracy by ACORN or The Tides Foundation or the Jewish Freemasons, a conspiracy whose effects can be reversed if you can just find and punish the conspirators.

People indulge in magical thinking for the same reason people once believed (or still believe) in magic, because it helps them deal with things they can't control. Drought killing your crops? Sacrifice a ram to Zeus, or dance the Rain Dance, or make an offering to the crocodile god. Mysterious illness killing your livestock? Use a ritual to redirect the evil magic onto a goat, and if that doesn't work, find the witches who've caused the illness and kill them.

Magic doesn't do anything, but it makes you feel like you're doing something. It takes away feelings of powerlessness before they become intolerable. And it allows you to release your fear and rage in the unholy pleasure of the witch hunt.

People give up on magic when they get better options. If you can irrigate your crops and take your cattle to the vet, you don't bother making sacrifices to the gods or dunking witches in the pond. You don't need magic to make you feel like you're doing something, because now there's actually something you can do. Modern people still resort to fantasy and superstition, of course, but mostly when their circumstances make them feel powerless or when science fails them. Superstition seems much more attractive when you can't see your way out of poverty, or when you depend on someone else for your livelihood. The anti-vaccination movement is a classic example of turning to magical thinking when science disappoints; medicine hasn't got a great list of solutions for autism yet, and so frustrated parents of autistic children look for a scapegoat to attack, and that lets them feel like they're doing something.

The sorry truth is that a large percentage of the human race, even those of us surrounded by modern technology, don't quite believe in the principles of science and reason. It's more that people believe that the bus comes in the morning, and that food you put in the fridge stays good for a few extra days, and that if you point the remote at the TV it will show you the channel you want. The average person on the street doesn't necessarily believe, deep down, in anything that happens at the Large Hadron Collider, because those things can't be seen or touched. But if the Large Hadron Collider eventually leads to, say, a new generation of tiny, powerful batteries, people will totally believe in the batteries. Reason beats superstition because it's better at miracles.

Our country is full of anxious and frightened people, who are right to be anxious and frightened. Our economy is broken. Our foreign military engagements look bleak. The future is unpredictable, so few people feel safe. People need to know that there is a plan for them, and their family, and a vision of the future, and they need a little more than that. They need that vision to start paying off.

Telling voters that the stimulus saved the economy from being much, much worse isn't useful. That statement is true, but it's only a description of the past. It does not answer the practical question, "How will we make this better?" If you're the smartest and most pragmatic leader in the world but unemployment is at 10% and you don't offer any way to fix that, people are going to start looking for someone dumber and less pragmatic. And if there are genuinely no rational solutions, you might as well sacrifice a chicken or two.

Glenn Beck is a huckster, but he's not just a huckster. He's a shaman. A white-bread witch doctor. He offers to solve his followers' problems with political voodoo. He's going to bring back the buffalo and make everyone impervious to bullets. He's going to make Obama disappear. He doesn't have real solutions, but he promises the illusion of solutions, and an illusion with no real solution looks better than no illusions and no solutions either.

Obama and his Administration can no longer appeal to "confidence" or "optimism" about the economy over the long run. Nobody pays their rent in the long run. And if the only solution people are offered is magical thinking, people are going to flock to those who can at least make that magical thinking entertaining. Obama is never going to beat our country's political witch doctors at their voodoo game.

Nor can Obama wait for the nation's economy to fix itself. The whole country can't bear to wait and do nothing. So if they're forced to wait, more and more people are going to gravitate to the magicians' tents and listen to what the magicians tell them. That has already started. And sooner rather than later, the magicians are going to tell them what every shaman or witch doctor says when their spells and and chants don't work fast enough: Someone must be interfering with the magic. Someone is keeping the spell from working. Then the magicians will send their followers to cast out the sinners, the witches, the evildoers responsible for the evil magic, and to punish them. And once that hunt begins things will happen that no reason can repair.

cross-posted at Dagblog

The inevitable talking point about Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case overturning Proposition 8, is that it's "judicial overreach." Reason snaps together the prefabricated argument here. For the last generation at least, the allegedly "conservative" position is that judges should not be allowed to "make law" or to defy the will of the voters by ensuring justice or allowing equal protection under the law. Apparently, the self-described "conservative" position is that the judicial branch does not have equal Constitutional authority with the other two branches, the plain text of the Constitution notwithstanding. Obviously these complaints aren't about genuine conservative principle. And for those who complain about the "tyranny" of lawfully appointed judges, guided by centuries of common law, I have one question:

How do people think slavery got outlawed in this country?

We all know how it got outlawed in the South, through the bloodshed and destruction of the Civil War. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about how slavery was abolished in the North.

We never talk about that. It's easier to imagine that the Northern colonies were always slave-free, from the moment that the Pilgrims got to Plymouth Rock. That's a flattering story for Northerners, and dwelling on the unflattering details would only cast yet more unflattering light on the South, which didn't even manage the slow, grudging abolition that took place in the North. So we all conspire in tactful silence. But here are the facts:

In 1776, slavery was legal in all thirteen of the American colonies. Every one of them.

In 1787, during the Constitutional Convention, slavery was legal in twelve states. Twelve. Sure, slavery was unpopular in the Northern states. It was relatively rare. But it was still legal. Which state's voters had decided that "all men are created equal" actually meant what it said, and outlawed human bondage?

None of them. It wasn't the voters.

Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts by the court decision Commonwealth v Jennison, handed down in 1783. Judicial overreach, my friends. Judicial overreach by some judge in Massachusetts. What is this country coming to?

Should the judge have waited? Should the judge have waited for some referendum, or some vote by the state legislature? Would that have avoided "backlash?" If he had, then a man named Quock Walker, a living human being who had been attacked and brutally beaten with a cane, would have been handed over to his attacker as a slave. The judge had to choose between Walker's freedom and the voters' mood. No contest, I say.

If the courts had to wait for the voters to correct injustice and uphold basic equality, Quock Walker would never have been free. The voters were quite content to let just a few people be held in slavery (or what seemed like a few if you didn't happen to be one of them) rather than make a fuss. Should the courts weigh the public's aversion to controversy more heavily then an individual's rights? No contest, I say.

Let's be frank: when people claim about judicial overreach, they are complaining about courts protecting people's rights. Have you ever heard about "judicial overreach" limiting someone's freedom of speech, or depriving defendants of the right to a trial? No, the complaints come when other Americans get their rights. The people complaining about "judicial overreach" are angry that black schoolkids get to go to desegregated schools. They are angry that Americans can get a lawyer before they're forced to sign a criminal confession. They're angry that black Americans and white Americans can get married without asking the neighbors for permission.

At this point I'd like to quote that dangerous raving lefty, George Washington:

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.

Washington isn't worried that courts will overreach by protecting citizens' inherent natural rights even when the rest of the voters don't happen to be feeling tolerant or indulgent. He expects those natural rights to be protected, whether the majority feels like it or not.

When people get angry about judges overreaching, remember this: those people are angry that you have rights. They don't want you to have rights that are unconditionally or absolutely your own. They want your freedom of religion and speech and assembly, your freedom to marry and raise children and think your own thoughts, to be privileges that can be taken away from you, gifts from the neighbors that they can take back if they don't like how you use them. And of course rights that you can't use without permission aren't rights at all. The people who complain about meddling judges are complaining because they want the power to meddle with you. What they want is the power to nullify your rights, whichever rights they please, anytime they can get 50.1% of the neighbors to agree.

It's not judicial overreach but voter overreach that menaces our freedom. When a majority of voters, however large or however slender, decides that they can take away the rights of their fellow citizens with a vote, they are overreaching. When voters decide that their personal comfort or discomfort or their own traditional beliefs outweigh someone else's right to marry as they choose or be paid for their honest labor or worship the God in which they believe, those voters have overreached. My rights are mine, and yours are yours. They do not expire on election day, and I do not need your votes to renew them. When I decide to get married, there are going to be exactly two people who get a vote about that. And if you don't like who I choose, I have two words for you, neighbor: sue me.

cross-posted at dagblog

A judge has overturned California's Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, because it is, and our country has moved one more step toward making marriage a universal right. Those who want marriage rights restricted will complain that this decision "undermines traditional marriage," and in a way they're correct. It does. And that's a good thing.

Don't get me wrong: heterosexual marriage will be fine. No one is going to prevent opposite-sex partners from marrying or interfere in straight relationships. This is why all those complaints about "undermining marriage" sound so strange and irrational, because straight people's right to marry is in no danger and the idea that someone else's marriage can undermine one's own is clearly illogical. But when marriage restrictionists say that same-sex marriages undermine "the institution of marriage" or "traditional marriage" or "marriage," they don't actually mean heterosexual marriage. They mean a specific kind of heterosexual marriage. They mean a "traditional" marriage where both partners are required to play stereotypical gender roles. "Marriage is between a man and a woman," is a code phrase. It means, "Marriage is between a man playing the traditional masculine role and a woman playing the traditional feminine role."

The key to this code is no secret. The religious groups who campaign most ferociously for restrictions on marriage are the same groups who promote wives' "godly submission" to their husbands. Many explicitly describe marriage with terms like "dominance," "authority," and "submission," and a few will come right out with terms like "hierarchy" and even "patriarchy." They purport that such dominance and submission and hierarchy are "ordained by God." Others will say that hierarchy is part of a natural order. The more euphemistic denominations resort to "complementarianism," with genteel rhapsodies about how men and women were created equal, of course, but also "fundamentally different," with each made to fill its own "complementary" equal-but-separate role. (Translation: women get to be "equal" by doing what their husbands say. Some deal, huh?)

If that's what you mean by "traditional marriage," then it's obvious why same-sex marriages feel threatening to you. There's no way that a marriage between two men or two women can stick to the old patriarchal arrangements. Show me a marriage between two men, and I'll show you at least one husband who does the dishes. Show me a marriage between two women, and I'll show you at least one wife who makes the financial decisions. Even when a same-sex marriage happens to include one spouse who tends to dominate the partnership and a spouse who acquiesces to that dominance, those roles can't be typecast by gender. They're expressions of individual personalities, not secondary sex characteristics. And of course many marriages just dispense with the old hierarchical patterns completely, as something unnecessary and unhealthy. Every same-sex marriage is living evidence that marriage does not have to be the way the traditionalists say. The man does not have to be in charge. The woman does not need to obey. If you have that old-fashioned arrangement, you're free to do so, but that's just your preference.

That's where the "undermining" thing comes in, and the rage and the fear. Freedom to conduct their own marriages in their own way, obedient to their own beliefs, is not enough for the marriage-restriction crowd. They need the rest of us, gay or straight, to actively affirm their values and world view. Whenever we do not, it is perceived as an attack on their values. Because of course part of the ideology of "traditional" marriage is that it is the only kind of marriage that can succeed. The husband and wife are kept to their "ordained" roles, no matter how poorly they fit or how much the old patterns of submission and domination and hierarchy damage their shared lives, by the fear that nothing else will work. Religious conservatives know all too well that most people, given a choice, will decide that "traditional" patriarchal marriage is a pretty bad deal. It's obviously a rotten deal for the women, and given enough time plenty of men can figure out that they're happier and better off with a marriage that's more like an equal partnership than a deranged remnant of feudalism. So the "traditionalists" have to insist that married couples have no choices, that it's men's authority and women's submission or chaos is come again. Without their mythology, without the idea that there's only one model that works, there's no way to keep people buying what they're selling.

If the people ranting against marriage rights truly believed that same-sex marriages were unhealthy or unworkable, they wouldn't be upset by them. That would be a lovely teachable moment for their cause. ("See what happens when you disobey God's laws?") No. They're frightened and furious because deep down they know that same-sex marriages do work, and because as universal marriage rights spread more and more people in more and more places will see more and more successful marriages that don't bother with the old gender rules at all. They are terrified that people will see marriages with two happy husbands or two happy wives. Because on the day that happens, the "traditional" marriage will be revealed as one option out of many, and that option will only be attractive when it makes both partners happy. The traditionalists know that's a competition that traditional marriage can't win.

So please, my soon-to-be-married friends, undermine away. Show the whole world how well marriage works without a patriarch or a handmaiden. And please accept my thanks, from the bottom of my hetero heart, for helping the world see that truth a little more clearly. I know this struggle is about your rights and not about giving straights some opportunity to learn and grow, but the fight for universal marriage helps the straights, too, and so deserves our gratitude. Thank you for helping men who want to marry women and women who want to marry men free ourselves from those old ingrained roles just a little bit more. Thank you for bearing witness to the many kinds of marriages that can survive and thrive. Thank you for reminding us that the roles we take inside a marriage aren't about our genders but our choices. Thanks for undermining traditional marriage and bless you for it. You're doing the Lord's work.

cross-posted at Dagblog

So the whole blogosphere has been tweeting and retweeting about Sarah Palin's accidental coinage of the word "refudiate," and her subsequent comparison of herself to William Shakespeare. (If that's the standard you want your prose judged against, sister, be my guest.) It's a big serving of the regular Palin-coverage stew: mockery of ignorance, defensive anti-intellectualism, just enough genuine condescension to lend the anti-intellectuals credibility.

So let's get this out of the way: Palin did not misuse the word "refudiate." She used it exactly as it was meant to be used.

Now, if you're going to ask people to do something, as Palin's original tweet pretends to do, you don't want to use a word like "refudiate," because it's not really a word and people might not understand what you'd like them to do. But Palin was not really asking anyone to do anything. There's nothing she actually wants to happen, and she's not really speaking to the "peace loving Muslims" her sentence addresses.

Palin's tweet is doing something else, which politicians have come to do far, far too much: pretending to ask someone to do something the politician doesn't actually want done. Palin wants to make a public show of demanding some people do something, so she can get credit for demanding that thing and so she can blame those people for not doing it. The audience for the statement is not the people she is pretending to address, about whom Palin does not care a wet rag. Her audience is her own following, and she wants to show herself standing up to the dastardly villains of whom she makes her basically fictional demand. It's a posture, not a request.

Palin has to know, somewhere, that Muslims aren't going to repudiate building mosques, the same way Christians never repudiate building churches and Jews never repudiate building synagogues. If you repudiate building mosques, you're really not a Muslim anymore. (And yes, of course, it's actually a Muslim community center and it's actually not at Ground Zero. Palin doesn't give a wet rag for facts, either.) Who is going to say, "That's right, the basic practice of our religion is a terribly insensitive thing to do, inseparable from religious-based terrorism?" Palin knows perfectly well that no one is going to do that. That's why she demanded it.

She's also not interested in actually communicating with "peace loving Muslims." She's interested in defining Muslims as NOT peace loving and in suggesting to her followers that no peace loving Muslims exist. First off, she's addressing "peace loving Muslims" as if the people building a community center in Manhattan, who got permission from their neighbors, were somehow not "peace loving." She's calling on some imaginary alternative group of "peace loving" Muslims to intervene against the villainous community-center builders, who are by implication a bunch of damned warmongers. Her first rhetorical goal is to disguise the peace-loving nature of the community-center builders, who are trying to do public outreach and promote non-violent Islam, and who Palin wants to demonize. (For those of you confused at home, it's like this: the Muslims putting up the buildings in Lower Manhattan are the peace lovers. QED.)

Palin's second rhetorical goal, which is even more insidious, is to define what a "peace loving Muslim" is. What she's implying, of course, is that we'll know the peace loving Muslims when they "refudiate" the mosque. And when nobody does speak out against building a place to peaceably worship their God, it will just go to show that none of the Muslims want peace! They're all confrontational warmongers, who want to put up thirteen-story buildings exactly at the moment in American construction industry badly needs work! How much more devious could they get? (Hint: it's about zoning. The evil plan is always, always about zoning.) See that? Sarah Palin asked the peace lovers to do the peace loving thing and "refudiate" and none of them had the common decency to refudiate anything! They're monsters, I tell you!

Again, if you're asking people to actually do something, it's important to use commonly accepted words to communicate what you want. But when you only want to make a theatrical demand that parties unknown do something that you're secretly hoping won't happen, then using real words doesn't matter. Actually, using fake words kind of helps. If you can get people to buy it, demanding that people do something that actually isn't anything, because there's no such thing as "refudiating," is a kind of insurance policy. If you asked people to denounce or repudiate or deplore something, there's a tiny chance that someone will actually do that and mess up your plan. But if you make a demand that isn't actually in English, demanding they do something that you don't quite describe, then they can't actually do it. And if they try, you can say they did it wrong, because you didn't mean that; you meant refudiate.

If Palin could swing it, she'd make more phony demands using even sillier and less meaningful words. What she would really like to say, on national television, is something like: "I think Barack Obama owes it to the American people to schnarfenoggle right away, and to keep schnarfenoggling until this country's frablejam is back oshkenizing again!" Then she'd go on Fox News every seventeen minutes and hammer Obama for not schnarfenoggling enough. And Obama would never be able to schnarfenoggle satisfactorily, because it's Palin who gets to decide what schnarfenoggling actually is.

Calling her stupid misses the point. Her words follow the same malicious logic that Humpty Dumpty uses:

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Sarah Palin wants to make up the words and define what they mean, however and whenever it suits her. She doesn't intend the rest of us to get a say in it. In her private language, putting up a building and blowing up a building are pretty much the same thing. And whatever else that is, it's not funny.

(cross-posted at Dagblog)

Or, Lessons the British Army Taught Us About Afghanistan; Part I here.

Part II: Let the War Drag On and On

This portrait depicts General Nathanael Greene, George Washington's most trusted and innovative lieutenant. Greene is the person Washington turned to when it got ugly. He assigned Greene to cover the Continental Army's retreat from New York when the British had all but finished the American army off; he assigned Greene to solve the supply problem at Valley Forge; and he sent Greene to lead the campaign in the South after the British had positively crushed Horatio Gates and destroyed the Americans' southern army. The British were winning the South, and Nathanael Greene is the reason they didn't.

The British had begun to win in the Carolinas because they had belatedly begun a strategy that emphasized political support on the ground. The Southern colonies (or at least their coastal areas) tended to be fairly rich in British loyalists for cultural and sectarian reasons. The Southerners along the coast tended to be Church of England, unlike the various dissenting Protestants who abounded in the North. So after some military setbacks the British sent Cornwallis to take Charleston and then organize and rally the local Loyalists into militia units that could pacify the countryside and squelch the rebel militias. The early stages of the plan worked well. Then Greene, with a little help from officers like Daniel Morgan and Light-Horse Harry Lee, ruined the strategy and wrecked Cornwallis's nerves.

It's not that Greene defeated Cornwallis. He never had the troops to win a direct assault, and he lost every pitched battle he tried. Part of the rebels' success involved upsets over smaller detachments of Cornwallis's army, which kept getting smaller. But mostly Greene won by not losing. He kept his "fugitive army" in the field. He kept living to fight another day. When he was in trouble, he made brilliant and even daring retreats. (Yes, there is such a thing as a daring retreat. Greene could choose the path that led to safety through danger and pull it off.) He floated like a butterfly. He stung like a bee.

The result is that even when Cornwallis won his objectives, his forces got weaker and weaker. But worse for Cornwallis, the Revolutionary militias kept rallying, and the Loyalists volunteers dribbled away. (Although one large and misguided group did attempt to join Light-Horse Harry Lee, under the impression that he was someone else.) As long as Greene stayed in the fight, his local sympathizers stayed in the fight, too. All Greene needed was to force a series of stalemates. Cornwallis needed a decisive checkmate, which every month got harder to achieve. As long as Greene hadn't lost, he was winning. As long as Cornwallis hadn't won, he was losing.

The lesson for counterinsurgencies, including the ones that we're fighting now is that ties go to the home team. The occupying army, like Cornwallis, has to win by destroying the opposition outright. The insurgency gains strength and support just by keeping the fight going. The longer the occupying force goes without defeating the insurgents the less likely the locals are to believe that they ever will. And once you decide the occupier can't win, you start planning for the next chapter.

We began fighting in Afghanistan in October 2001, and started occupying bases there in November of that year. (If you're wondering, the Soviets spent nine years and two months fighting in Afghanistan; we are six months from breaking their record.) We are still fighting the Taliban. Can the Taliban forcibly drive us from Kabul? Hardly. Could they directly assault the main body of our forces? Of course not. They can't afford to do that. But they don't need to.

Nathanael Greene couldn't drive Cornwallis out of Charleston. He never bothered to try. And for that matter, Washington couldn't drive the British out of New York, which they took from him in late 1776 and kept for the whole war. They took Philadelphia, too, chasing out the Continental Congress and Washington couldn't do much about it. But the British couldn't win that way, and neither can we. If we can't destroy the Taliban as an effective force, they can wait us out forever. They have nowhere else to go. Charles Cornwallis wanted to go back to England someday; Nathanael Greene was already home. The visiting team needs to end the contest.

Many people complain that setting any specific date for a draw-down or withdrawal simply encourages our military enemies (whether in Afghanistan or Iraq) to wait us out. This is logical enough, but it ignores one basic fact. Our opponents in Afghanistan and Iraq have always been waiting us out. They're not going to decide to wait us out because they have a specific date to look forward to. Their original schedule was to wait us out forever. (Washington, bidding farewell to his troops in 1783, talks about gaining the victory "so much sooner than we could have expected.") Giving them a date to circle on the calendar doesn't change their plans. They will resist as long as they can. The only way to stop them is to destroy their means of resistance.

There are really only two choices for an occupying force: win or go home.

cross-posted at Dagblog

PART I: Kill Civilians

The Senate Armed Services Committee is apparently very concerned about our rules of engagement in Afghanistan. Before they confirm General David Petraeus to the Afghanistan command, they want to make sure that he will loosen up those rules of engagement to allow more airstrikes and more artillery strikes. He has made soothing voices to the effect that he will be sure not to hold back the heavy firepower too strictly.

As soon as you're worried that your counterinsurgency troops aren't using heavy enough firepower, the counterinsurgency strategy is all but dead. I could easily write a thousand tedious words explaining why, but I would like to offer this image instead. It's from March 5, 1770, in Boston.

The Senators' concerns seem to have been specifically prompted by the Rolling Stone article that brought down General Stanley McChrystal. In addition to featuring a number of shockingly undisciplined and insubordinate remarks by McChrystal and his aides, that article includes a number of complaints of the strictness of McChrystal's rules of engagement from frustrated rank and file soldiers who'd prefer to "get [their] gun on." While I've criticized McChrystal's strategy and believe (based mostly on the results in Marja) that it's failing, the problem isn't that McChrystal is too squeamish about accidentally blowing away civilians. "Too careful about killing civilians" can really never be the problem with executing a counterinsurgency. But a reflexive desire to do more shooting, whether that reflex is expressed by grumbling soldiers on the front lines or anxious lawmakers in the capital, is a sign that the counterinsurgency strategy hasn't been fully accepted or understood. The goal of a counterinsurgency is to protect the civilian population and build up political support on the ground. Killing Afghan civilians achieves all of the key counterinsurgency goals, but it achieves them for the Taliban.

Our British cousins have generously provided us with a clinic on how to lose a counterinsurgency. In fact, they demonstrated those lessons for us in person, at great sacrifice, over two hundred years ago. Consider that knowledge base part of the United States' national starter kit. Since we seem to have lost touch with those lessons, I'd like to celebrate the Glorious Fourth (in part) with a short series of posts reviewing a few of the military tutorials left by Generals Gage, Howe, Clinton, Burgoyne, and Cornwallis, with generous underwriting by George III.

Am I really comparing George Washington to the Taliban on Fourth of July weekend? The political, philosophical, and moral answer is to that question is No, No, and Hell No. I take proud, patriotic delight in the Revolution's success, and I want to see the Taliban utterly destroyed. But the military history answer to that question is: Sadly, Yes. I wish to God that the situations didn't look so much alike. But in each case you have a highly trained, superbly equipped and deeply professional force of soldiers facing an ideologically-driven local opponent, largely composed of irregulars, across a large land area full of rugged terrain. The analogy isn't perfect; no analogies are. But in some ways, we have it harder than Gage, Howe et al. had it. Washington's army was much more conventional than the enemies we're fighting, and thus easier to defeat by conventional means, and the cultural gap between the British occupiers and British-American rebels was almost nothing. Howe and Washington had thousands of times more in common than we have with our Afghan allies, let alone with our enemies.

It's tempting of course, to view the situations as different because the Continental army fought for noble principles that we admire, and the Taliban fight for a fanatical ideology that we despise. But if we're thinking about how to win a war, we can't yield to that temptation. On the ground, the difference between soldiers fighting from deep commitment to a good idea and soldiers fighting from deep commitment to a bad idea is nothing at all. It doesn't matter that the Taliban only think that they're right. What matters is that they do think they're right, and they act on that. The British didn't think the American rebels were right; most didn't even think that the rebels were acting from sincere principle. And that mindset was part of the British problem.

Let's consider the illustration of the Boston Massacre again, and try to see it from the British point of view. Most Americans learn about this in grade school as a piece of outrageous, unmotivated bloodthirst, which is certainly how it looked to people in Boston. But the British soldiers viewed themselves as protecting themselves from a dangerous mob, and their position was reasonable enough to get the soldiers acquitted. They were in fact, surrounded by an angry crowd, and it was impossible to know how serious a danger that crowd posed. If Crispus Attucks looked aggressive to them, it's because Crispus Attucks actually did look aggressive, and he was angry as hell. There had been daily brawls between soldiers and Boston crowds for the previous three days, and it looked like only a matter of time before a British soldier was badly injured or killed. The soldiers had marched into the crowd on March 5 to rescue a private who was surrounded and under attack by a whole gang of infuriated locals; their mindset going in was about protecting the corps. And eventually their commander, Capt. Thomas Preston decided to err on the side of protecting his troops. He wasn't going to wait for one of his men to get hurt or killed before he decided that the mob was really dangerous. When in doubt, bring your own men home alive. The rest is history.

Captain Preston's logic is exactly what the Senate has been urging on General Petraeus. The soldiers who chafe at McChrystal's strict rules of fire would prefer to serve under a Thomas Preston themselves. And truth be told, there are lots of junior officers in Afghanistan and Iraq right now, charged with leading their own troops through confused and dangerous streets, following the Preston handbook. In their position, charged with their responsibilities, I would probably do the same. Threats are hard to identify until too late, some attacks come from people who seem like civilians, and the American officers want to protect their own men. The duty to their own troops is much too basic, too fundamental, to deny. Better to make a reasonable mistake that kills a civilian than any mistake that kills one of your own, the logic goes. I don't know how I would tell a captain or lieutenant leading a patrol anything different.

The problem is that those mistakes don't seem reasonable to the home team. When civilians from your own city or town or village get killed by soldiers, you don't say, "Well, it was an easy mistake to make, and those soldiers are under a lot of pressure." Nobody sees the heavily-armed foreigners as the ones whose safety is in jeopardy. And nobody ever forgets or forgives.

Of course, from the other side of the Atlantic, what matters is bringing your own troops home safely. Half a dozen civilians killed in Boston didn't make much impression in London, but having a British soldier killed would be a huge problem. It's natural to count your own losses first, and to forgive mistakes made in the name of protecting the boys on the front line. It's hard to feel deeply about a few regrettable accidental deaths on the other side of the world. But a few civilian deaths in your neighborhood is just flat-out murder, a bloody massacre, and there's no dealing with the people who ordered it. Captain Preston and his men got acquitted in Boston, but even their lawyer didn't have any sympathy for them. His letters always refer to their actions as simply "the massacre," and he became one of the loudest, most radical voices for independence. His name was John Adams.

One last lesson from the bloody events of March 5, 1770: it was only March 5, 1770. It was three years before the Boston Tea Party, five before Lexington and Concord, six before Washington forced the British out of Boston. But the Massacre was firmly on New Englanders' mind the whole time. Washington just had to say "March 5" to get his troops fired up. They never got over it. They never moved on. And that's the sobering lesson for us, seven years into Iraq and almost nine into Afghanistan: what happens early matters. Events from early in an occupation can change the direction course of events in powerful ways, and those events can't be reversed easily. The strategy that you should have used in 2002 isn't necessarily available in 2010. There's no do-over button. Things happen, they have consequences, and you have to deal with them.

cross-posted at Dagblog

cross-posted at Dagblog

If you tune out the upcoming storm of spin, distraction and hype, what just happened is very simple: a general whose strategy has failed has tried to tie the Commander-in-Chief's hands by running to the press. McChrystal's goal was to create a political situation inside the Beltway in which the President would face problematic amounts of criticism if he changed either the unsuccessful strategy or the unsuccessful commander.

It's insubordination in an attempt to conceal failure, the full McClellan. It is a threat both to our Constitutional traditions and to the proper military defense of our nation.

When President Obama took office, he made a decision to commit further resources to gaining some credible form of victory in Afghanistan. It would have been easier in some ways for him to plan a simple phased withdrawal from both Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of Obama's political base was against any extension of the war. At that time, McChrystal promised that his own strategy, backed by a certain number of additional troops, would achieve certain results in a certain time frame. Based on those promises, Obama approved McChrystal's strategy instead of others (including strategies based on troop drawdowns), committed more troops, and gave McChrystal the Afghanistan command.

McChrystal has not delivered the promised results. The recent American offensives have not achieved their goals, and it's increasingly apparent that McChrystal's plan isn't going to work. So, having let the President down, McChrystal has attempted to cover his backside by letting the President down. He has permitted his aides to commit insubordination by slagging the civilian authorities around Obama to the press, and to relay McChrystal's own personal contempt for the Commander-in-Chief. Of course, McChrystal delegated aides to do this, not being man enough to take responsibility for his own insubordination.

Some right-wingers are going to take up McChrystal's cause and depict Obama as a soft, decadent civilian and McChrystal as a tough, upright, honorable soldier. But nothing about McChrystal's behavior is remotely tough, honorable or upright. He is treacherously backstabbing the leader who promoted him. McChrystal's ability to work back-biting and ass-covering into the same motion just shows how very supple and flexible his character is, and how little he's burdened by any spine. McChrystal is willfully violating the military's code of ethics and conduct. He is trying to duck his own command responsibilities by whining and slinging mud. And he's sent his deputies to do it for him. I'm having a hard time seeing any soldierly virtue here.

But more importantly, there's a question of our Constitution at sake. As I've pointed out before, civilian authority over the military is one of the central principles for which the American Revolution was fought. The Massachusetts Minutemen were fighting to end a military governorship of their colony. George Washington went to enormous pains to make clear that the Presidency was a civilian and not a military office, and that every military officer served the civil political authority, the power delegated by the people. The Constitution designates the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces for exactly this reason.

Over the last few decades, parts of the right wing in this country have tried to use the phrase "Commander-in-Chief" to mean exactly the opposite of what it means, to imply that the President is somehow a military officer and thus answerable to the military's norms or the military's approval. This is completely backwards. The intent of the Constitution and its Framers is that the military exists to serve the people, not the other way around, and so the military must be absolutely subordinate to the country's elected leader. George Washington wrote that chain of command. It's not for Stanley McChrystal to go outside it.

Civilian authority over the military is necessary for any real democracy; you can't have a democracy if a bunch of people with guns refuse to honor the elected leaders. But it's also a smart principle for national defense. A military that isn't accountable to any higher power is a military that allows itself to stick by strategies after they stop working. Giving the generals and admirals freedom to make all the decisions can actually make the military less effective and the nation less safe. Someone has to have a veto when a field commander is too stubborn or proud to admit that things aren't working, or when the military brass refuses to accept changing times. Sometimes you need a politician like FDR to tell the Army that cavalry has become obsolete. Sometimes you need a civilian like Lincoln to replace a West Point thoroughbred like McClellan. What gave Lincoln the right? The Constitution. What made some Illinois lawyer think that he understood strategy and tactics better than General George McClellan? The facts on the battlefield. That McClellan went whining to the newspapers and the opposition party only confirms the man's unfitness.

The same old truths are true today. If McChrystal can't win the war in Afghanistan, he shouldn't try fighting one in the media. And if we start letting the paper battles of the news cycle decide how we fight our actual wars, our country will lose over and over again.

Ta-Nehisi is running some excellent comment threads about how deeply torture runs through American history, prompted by George W. Bush's appalling endorsement of torture. In those threads, I realized something about my own perspective on American history: because my academic work is on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I see the Founders not so much as founders but as people responding to their own ugly history. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not starting points, but pointed replies; not abstract term papers for some philosophy class, but a practical summary of the history that the Founders did not want repeated.

So, when a lot of Ta-Nehisi's commenters see the United States as a country which has always officially disavowed torture but often tacitly permitted it, and point to a long, compelling trail of evidence, I see a country taking the step of officially disavowing torture after centuries in which torture was an official part of the judicial system -- hell, after centuries in which public torture was considered morally edifying. It's certainly true that various kinds of torture have flourished without legal sanction in this country, but that comes after hundreds of years of mind-boggling cruelty perpetrated by the law itself. I'm talking about courts sentencing people to bodily mutilation, confessions being extorted with the strappado and the rack and the wheel, defendants being crushed to death under heavy weights if they did not enter a plea. That the Founders explicitly rejected that history makes a difference. An America that lives up to its ideals and an America that only pretends to live up to its ideals have never been the only choices. We could have had, could have, an America that pretends to no ideals at all.

I have a classroom rule that I phrase as a joke: I don't discuss current events in class, and my definition of "current events" is everything after 1689. In part, I began blogging in order to have a venue for the strong opinions and the partisan politics that would be inappropriate in my classroom. When I formulated the 1689 Rule, only six years ago, it seemed perfectly safe to me. The great political-philosophical questions of my period were thoroughly settled. Obviously, the 1689 Rule would always keep me well out of whatever cable-news debate was raging at the time. Nobody could still have hard feelings over the execution of Charles II. But gradually, to my real horror, I found that the 1689 Rule no longer worked completely, because American conservatives began to reopen debates that had been settled three hundred years before.

One day, delivering a brief lecture about Christopher Marlowe, I mentioned that some of the scandalous accusations against Marlowe can't be taken as completely reliable, because they were obtained by torture. And I saw a strange expression, a flicker of deliberate self-control, cross a student's face. I realized, suddenly, that he thought I was politicizing the class, taking a stand on a public debate. Obviously, I was commenting on the Bush/Cheney torture policies. But just as obviously to me, I was not. I hadn't formed my opinion about Elizabethan torturers because of Bush, or Cheney, or any of their minions. I'd come to my understanding of that question before Bush ran for President; statements taken under torture are essentially dictated by the torturer. (I've seen cases where this becomes obvious even on the grammatical level, as the document shifts back and forth between first and third person.) I hadn't broken the 1689 rule. 2006 had.

Over the past few years, modern "conservatism" has kept encroaching on my 1689 boundary, turning questions I had considered entirely non-controversial into objects of partisan debate. Once they got around to habeas corpus and the right to a jury trial, I realized we weren't even back in the 1500s anymore. Our contemporary political debates had taken us back to 1214, to a world without a Magna Carta. I couldn't say that I was avoiding current debates by sticking to my field; the arguments had moved back to centuries before my field.

My goal in the classroom is to offer students tools for thinking questions through on their own, and not pre-fabricated conclusions. I avoid bottom-line statements about current events because that doesn't teach them to think. But our degraded national discourse has put me in a position where I can't teach sound thinking skills without taking a position. I can't pretend that the words in a document are a self-evident "fact" when they were extracted from a man hanging from the ceiling with dislocated shoulder blades. I can't responsibly teach students to ignore that context. If I did, I would be actively making them stupid. And that brings Bush and Cheney and John Yoo into my classroom when they don't belong there. I can't keep contemporary debates out of my classroom because so-called "conservatives" are bent on disputing the foundational truths on which America was built.

So what worries me these days is not the dark underside of American history, but the dark preludes to that history. Most progressives still frame the debate as a choice between the ugly parts of the last two hundred years and the possibility of a better future. But the alleged conservatives are no longer confining themselves to that debate. They aren't satisfied with America's original sins any more. They want to go back to earlier darkness and chaos, to crimes and abuses that the Founders renounced in horror. It's no longer a choice between a nation that gives lip service to basic rights and a nation that genuinely honors them. It's becoming a choice between a nation that expresses certain fundamental values and a nation that openly renounces them. When George W. Bush boasts of ordering torture and brags that he would do it again, he is declaring that torture is an outright good, that it is an expression of justice. And it puts the lie to the pretense of Constitutional "originalism." What part of the proscription against "cruel and unusual punishments" is unclear? What part would allow drowning a man until he almost dies, over and over again? Bush is not committed to our nation's origins. He is essentially post-American: no longer believing in this country's foundational principles or feeling obligation to them.

That is not merely evil, but folly. The Founders were not infallible oracles or prophets, God knows. They did not perfectly foresee America's future or its future challenges. But about the past, their own historical past, they were very, very shrewd. Their response to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history is the fruit not just of reason but of hard, bitter experience. The Constitution is a map to places that the Founders could still see in the fading distance, and to which they never, ever wanted to go back. On that, we should trust them.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Let me start with this: I don't want Nikki Haley to be Governor of South Carolina. No way. No how. I don't especially want her to win her primary, and I would actively root for her defeat in the general election. But the way Haley is being treated is dead wrong.

I don't want Haley to become Governor because I think her ideas are mistaken and misguided. I don't think modern conservatism leads to good policies. So, I hope she loses. But the question of whether or not she's perfectly faithful to her husband has nothing to do with what kind of leader she would be.

Haley has now had two Republican political operatives come forward to boast that they've slept with her: first the conservative blogger Will Folks, who claimed that he was forced to blog about this because a local newspaper was going to expose it (like that makes sense), and now a lobbyist named Larry Merchant, who came forward just because. The circumstances of the accusation are absolutely bizarre. I can't recall another case where the alleged sex partners volunteer this kind of information, unless they're being paid by a scandal rag. Folks's and Merchant's motives remain an interesting question. But the bigger question is: who the hell cares?

If Haley has had relationships outside her marriage, that's a problem for her to work out with her husband. It has absolutely nothing to do with how she would serve the people of South Carolina. That's true whether she's a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat. People can be good governors and problematic spouses, or wonderful spouses but catastrophic governors. They are separate issues. And if I think this when it's my candidate getting dragged through the mud, I'm obligated to speak up when it's someone from the other side being dragged. The way Nikki Haley is being treated is wrong. Both she and the voters of South Carolina deserve better.

There are some cases in which sex scandals incidentally cast light on fitness to lead, but for a scandal to be fair game, it has to have lead to some real misuse of office. If politicians use public money to enrich their lovers, that's a scandal. If they're sleeping with the lobbyists who lobby them, that's a scandal. Mark Sanford's trips to Argentina are a problem because he neglects his public duties to take them; the Governor of South Carolina can't just disappear for a week because he's in love. Eliot Spitzer's sex life is a problem partly because prostitution is illegal but mostly because the prices were so high that he had to launder money to pay, which means supporting the dirty banking that enables other, uglier crimes. But sleeping with Will Folks doesn't harm the people of South Carolina; it only harms his partner's self-esteem. (Sleeping with Will Folks is probably its own punishment.)

I'm also disturbed by the way even the usual vicious rules of the scandal game have changed because the target is a woman. I don't recall any male politician, ever, having someone inside his own party's political establishment stepping forward to smear him. Either investigative journalists dig up their own proof, or tabloid journalists pay an aggrieved ex-girlfriend who has no prospects of her own left. What's shocking here is that two men who expect to have futures in the Republican Party feel free to smear a Republican front-runner. They don't even need to offer proof; they just say they've slept with her, like they're bragging in the locker room. The double-standard here is pretty hard to miss: extramarital sex is imagined as much more shameful for the woman than for the man. These men figure they can end a female politician's career just by publicly saying, "Yup, I did her," but only suffer a mild setback for themselves. Seriously, can you imagine a female Congressional staffer coming forward, all on her own, to bring down a gubernatorial candidate from her own party, and ever getting work inside the party again? But evidently Folks and Merchant believe (and expect others to believe) that Nikki Haley should be a hundred times more ashamed of sleeping with them than they're ashamed of sleeping with her. And you know what? In a certain way, they're right.

(cross-posted at Dagblog)

Israel has always needed its friends. And now that Israeli forces have killed nine civilians on the high seas, and Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defense Minister, has followed up by blaming the aid flotilla to Gaza for "political provocation", Israel is going to need its allies' friendship more than ever. Over the next few days, there is going to be a loud outcry from some quarters inside the United States that the US is not backing Israel enough, that they are letting Israel down. Those voices are wrong. The United States has already let Israel down, and so have the people who will complain that Israel is not getting enough support. If we had been better friends to Israel, this terrible and wicked thing would not have happened in the first place.

The best friends are the ones who want the best for you, not the ones that want to make the biggest show of friendship. And when you're in need, the best friends are the ones who give the best help and the soundest advice, not necessarily the ones who are focused on displaying their loyalty. That advice includes talking sense to you when you need it, and the friend who won't or can't do that is a sorry friend to have.

If you've had too much to drive, the best friend you have is the one who takes your car keys away. The worst is the one who loudly declares that if you say you can drive, you can drive, and tells you not to listen to the haters. The guy who unconditionally supports your decision to drive while plastered really is sincere, and he wants you to know how much he likes you. It's just that you may never see him again. The guy who tells you you're drunk and lets you curse him in a rage, but ends up driving you home, is the guy.

For a long, long time now, American political discussion of Israel has been dominated by the better-friend-than-thou camp, the people concerned with demonstrating their superior loyalty to Israel. And those people have shouted down anyone who doesn't back every Israeli action, no matter how foolish or self-destructive, as not true friends of Israel: indeed, tried to brand anyone who talks sense to Israel as its enemy, an anti-Semite or "self-hating Jew." These people have been more concerned in displaying the intensity of friendship than in living up to the full obligations of friendship. Think that killing civilians is counter-productive? Then, according to the self-proclaimed friends of Israel, you're an anti-Semite, and you should shut up. If you were a real friend, you would support any military action by Israel, no matter how bad a strategy it is in the long run. Are you saying Bibi Netanyahu can't hold his liquor?

Self-declared friendship for Israel has won out over candid friendship in American politics, to the extent that American administrations have felt either unwilling or politically unable to restrain Israel's strategic mistakes. No one in high office is allowed to take Israel's keys, and anyone who suggests that they shouldn't drive faces enormous pressure to show their "support" for Israel (by slapping them on the back and even buying them one for the road). Even as the Israeli government has grown more short-sighted and reckless, we've become more passive and enabling, more reluctant to preserve Israel from self-destruction. At this point, they don't believe we will ever have the guts to take their keys, which makes them more reckless still.

If we had been better friends to Israel, they would never have gone so far down a road that risks so much and leads to so little. If we had been better friends to Israel, we would have tried to talk sense to them long before this. If we had been better friends to Israel, they would never have felt that they could forcibly board ships flying NATO flags in international waters. But we haven't been. We've only pretended to friendship, and let them go to hell. This week pundits will complain that we've stopped being real friends to Israel, but the truth is that we haven't even begun.

The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf Coast boggles the mind. And looking at one offshore well destroying such a huge swath of fragile ecologies, it's easy to think, "Man, there's more oil down there than I thought. I see what those 'drill, baby, drill types' were talking about."

But here's my question: how much oil is that compared to America's energy needs? If all of that oil had gone into refineries instead of into the Gulf and our wetlands, how long would it keep our cars and lights and internet servers going?

So, apparently, about 5,000 barrels a day have been coming out of that well into the ocean. (210,000 gallons a day, if that's how you'd prefer to think of it.) America's daily oil consumption is somewhere between 20 and 21 million barrels a day. That's 21,000,000 a day. Let's round it down to an even 20 million, just to make the arithmetic easier (I was an English major). And what the heck, maybe some easy, painless conservation efforts could get us down to 20 million a day; they certainly wouldn't get us much lower.

Even an English major can figure out that, with the numbers rounded down for optimism, we use four thousand times as much oil every day as the amount that's going into the Gulf. That's four thousand. (20,000,000/5,000 = 4,000) The amount of oil that the Deepwater Horizon is clogging the Gulf of Mexico with every day is still only enough to meet the US's energy needs for, ummm, let's see ... 24 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds, divided by 4,000, is ... uhhh...

21.6 seconds.

Of course, that's only if you round our daily consumption down a little.

It's hard to get one's head around the astronomical numbers involved in our energy policy, but that's a good concrete example. The amount of oil we use every 21.6 seconds is enough for a massive environmental catastrophe. The next time BP (or Exxon or Shell) shows you an "environmentally conscious" TV ad, remember that during those thirty seconds America used every bit as much oil as went into the Gulf of Mexico today, and almost 40% more.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Today, Ann Gerhart at the Washington Post came right out and said it: Elena Kagan's nomination tot he Supreme Court is suspect because she is not a mother. So that dog whistle I was complaining about? It's a steam whistle now, very audible and very shrill.

I'm not going to link to the Gerhart's post, because bad behavior should not be rewarded with traffic. If you want to find it on the WaPo opinions page, her title is "The Supreme Court Needs More Mothers." No, I am not making that up.

Here is Gerhart's ringing conclusion:

In saying he wants justices who have "heart" and "empathy," and who understand "how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives," Obama has invited us to ask who has a life outside work and who doesn't. That's hard to determine in a confirmation process that will require Kagan, like Sotomayor before her, to crimp her personality and bite her tongue.

Motherhood offers a one-word verifier. It signals a woman with an intensity of life experiences, jammed with joys and fears, unpredictability and intimacy, all outside the workplace. Much of the time, it's the opposite of being strategic and assiduously prepared.

It's a story we understand without needing all the details.

Heavens no, who needs details when we have handy stereotypes? As far as Gerhart's concerned, motherhood is sufficient evidence of your intense inner life and your capacities for "unpredictability and intimacy" (are we hiring a Supreme Court Justice or writing a personal ad?), even if the nominee doesn't happen to be unpredictable, joyful, spontaneous, or capable of intimacy. Yes, parenting, as Francis Bacon tells us, exercises and strengthens our compassion, but not every father or mother is compassionate. By Gerhart's standards, Margaret Thatcher should be considered compassionate, but Jane Addams not. If you find those examples cheap and easy, they are. It only took three seconds to come up with them. But Gerhart didn't think that long.

Part of what's frustrating is that Gerhart enumerates the obstacles that today's women face and then offers a solution that scapegoats women. It's really hard to juggle motherhood and career, Gerhart reasons, and so women who choose to make their career the priority should be punished by, what was it? Oh yes, blocking their careers. Can't see anything unfair or unreasonable about that.

I'll try to explain this again, in words that even a WaPo Op-ed writer can understand (although Ruth Marcus needs no help, and her piece on Kagan is a gem):

It is paradoxically easier for women in the path-breaking generation in any field to juggle motherhood and career. How could that be? Because that generation of women doesn't need to worry about being slow-tracked if they get pregnant. They've been slow-tracked anyway. This is why Justice O'Connor could be a mother and the first woman on the Supreme Court. First of all, O'Connor's career was initially held back to an artificially slow pace (during her prime child-bearing years), because women lawyers had few or no opportunities. (Again, she finished 3rd at Stanford Law, and that didn't get her a job. Her classmate William Rehnquist, 1st in the class, had plenty of offers.) O'Connor had to break her own trail, slowly, and taking time off to start a family had a relatively low cost. Today's most promising young lawyers have to choose: a baby now, or a Supreme Court clerkship this year? A baby now, or bill extra hours to make partner at White, Shoe & Clubb? A baby now, or a chance to serve in the new Administration? O'Connor didn't have those choices. Secondly, as slow as progress is for women in the ground-breaking generation, there are still no other women ahead of them. O'Connor could take her winding route to nomination, raise a family, and still be one of the most qualified female Republican lawyers in the United States when she was nominated. That is no longer true for women who made law review at top schools. They are no longer alone, but they also no longer have the field to themselves.

I've seen this first hand, watching my mother break into a field that had always belonged to men. I could watch, because my mother had me before she started that career, and even before she had gone to college. (The first time I ever entered a college classroom, it was because Mom's baby-sitting arrangements had fallen through.) But even with that late start, Mom was always unusually qualified for a woman police officer her age. It was unusual for her even to be a police officer. Everything she did and everywhere she went, she was going first. There were no female peers for her to be measured against. But the first woman to lead the NYPD or LAPD or the FBI won't be the only woman in the NYPD, LAPD or FBI; she'll be one women among many, and they'll all face hard choices about career and family.

What's repulsive about Gerhart's argument is that none of these standards are applied to male nominees. No one's asking if male nominees are dads, or how much attention they actually spare for my children, nor should we. I might be more sympathetic to the nominate-more-mommies argument if we demanded that people like Roberts and Alito coach spend a certain number of hours flying kites or coaching Little League, but not much more sympathetic, because applying a foolish standard universally doesn't make it less foolish. We demand intellectual achievement and legal heft from our nominees, and that's fine. It's just from the women that we demand intellectual achievement, legal heft, musical laughter, a devil-may-care smile, and experience catching fireflies in bottles on summer nights. A male justice has to be a judicial heavyweight. A female justice apparently has to be a judicial heavyweight and a character in a Bronte novel. (Although if she is openly emotional, or even just a Latina, her emotionalism is suspect.)

And what's truly repellent about Gerhart is her traffic in the ugly saw that childless women lack full emotional lives. Everybody knows, of course, that a woman who doesn't get married and have kids, and most especially a high-achieving woman who doesn't get married and have kids, is entirely out of touch with her inner life, deprived of her full capacities to imagine, intuit, hope, and feel.

You can ask the Bronte sisters about that last one, too.

cross-posted at Dagblog

cross-posted at Dagblog

Suddenly, with the Elena Kagan nomination, careerism is a terrible thing.

When John Roberts was the nominee, it was all about the splendid qualifications of his splendid career. Much the same when it was Samuel Alito. When Sonia Sotomayor was the nominee, it was all about whether or not her qualifications were actually qualifications, what with her being a Latina and all. (If you get a summa cum laude from Princeton but you're not white, how can Pat Buchanan be sure you can even read English?) But everyone agreed that the big questions were career and qualifications. Now that Kagan has been nominated, some people are complaining that to be this qualified, she must have spent her entire adult life pursuing those qualifications! My goodness! Anybody with such an impressive career must be a ... a ... a ... careerist!

Can you hear the dog whistle yet?

David Brooks is terribly, terribly worried that Kagan is a careerist "Organization Kid," who has repressed her true self to get ahead: "prudential rather than poetic," calculating rather than passionate. (Why any rational person would want a poetic judge rather than a prudential one is beyond me.) Andrew Sullivan is scared, too, because Kagan's "life, so far as one can tell, is her career" which has kept her from taking bold, passionate positions. What bold positions? Coming out as a lesbian, of course, which is Sullivan's chief demand, Kagan's actual desires, in every sense of that word, notwithstanding. According to Sullivan, Kagan's "entire life seems to have been a closet - in the pursuit of a career."

Can you hear it? It's pitched very, very high.

Oh, fine then. Here is twittering twit Howard Kurtz, answering the whistle and salivating:

Kagan, Sotomayor -- Do some women dispense with husbands and kids to climb to the top of their professions?
http://tinyurl.com/2g9s5jy
Howard Kurtz

(h/t John Cole, whose post on Kagan is superb)

Whoops. There it is. You see, Kagan has been so focused on her career that she's left no time for her personal growth. (Nudge, nudge.) She has turned her back on her own passions. (Wink) She needs to get off the career track for a little while and do things that wouldn't help her resume but which are, you know, personally fulfilling. (Nudge, wink, nudge, wink.) That would make her more emotionally well-rounded. Otherwise, of course, she must be passionless, emotionally stunted, and estranged from her real self. Probably a lesbian, too.

Only Kurtz is clumsy enough to say it aloud. That's why it's a dog whistle. But it's meant to summon up familiar anti-feminist stereotypes about career women, and about the horrors of sacrificing one's "natural" maternal destiny in order to pursue a professional career. The point of those stereotypes is not to deal with the genuine difficulties facing women who want both motherhood and careers, but to intensify those difficulties, and to make the option of forestalling or foregoing motherhood appear illegitimate. The argument is that women who aren't mothers, and most especially women who aren't mothers because they have been pursuing careers, aren't real women at all. And of course, since they're not real women, they don't know what they really want.

This is why one 50-year-old nominee was presented as brilliant, poised, and prudent while an essentially identical 50-year-old nominee is presented as a repressed, wonkish automaton. Elena Kagan isn't any more of a careerist or a nerd than John Roberts was. Who could be? And no one imagines Roberts as less authentic or less human, let alone less manly, because he delayed marriage until after he was forty. No one faults a man who postpones starting family life while building his career.

It's startling the extent to which the press coverage of Kagan has been dominated by her childlessness and her apparent partnerlessness. On one hand you have the must-be-gay storyline, with its breathtaking ignorance of the choices professional women in our society face. (I have no idea who Elena Kagan likes to sleep with, but I know that there are many, many successful women who have trouble finding appropriate and supportive partners. To treat the fact that Kagan is single as some inexplicable oddity, which must be hiding a deep personal secret, is to indulge in the luxury of not having to notice certain basic facts. ) On the other hand, you have the "careerist" meme, which is inseparable from the stereotypical ways in which career women are imagined in American society. Either way, it boils down to the same ugly idea: whenever a woman gets to the head of the class, her femininity is suspect. So she needs to prove that she's a real woman. Bullshit, I say. It stinks.

Let's face some hard facts about the Supreme Court nominating process these days. The two key demands are that the nominee must be indisputably, even overwhelmingly, qualified (because the opposition party will attack any weakness) and that the nominee be as young as possible, preferably 50 or so (so that the nominating party keeps the seat as long as it can). Those two requirements demand a candidate who's been on the fast track for his or her entire career. All of the hand-wringing about the way everyone on the court is from Harvard or Yale Law stems from this. The only way to become impeccably qualified for the Supreme Court by age 50 is to get a hot start and keep it in high gear for three solid decades: clerking at the Supreme Court, followed by a series of plum appointments in some mixture of high-powered firms, the federal judiciary, government service, and Top 5 law schools. Lawyers who begin without elite pedigrees and influential recommendations can build an equally powerful resume, and sometimes achieve more than their peers from Harvard, Yale and Chicago, but it will take them longer. When someone from a merely excellent law school is qualified for the Court, they will likely be 60 or 65, rather than 50. The nominees we're seeing are all, necessarily, careerists: there's no longer any time to relax if you're going to be ready for nomination before you're too old to nominate.

Keeping this blistering pace also doesn't allow much time for bearing children. It's possible for men to stay on the new future-nominee schedule and start a family, because they don't need to sacrifice their time or energy to pregnancy, and because it's easier for them to find partners who will take on more of the child care. That doesn't mean that professional women can't have children and be successful; it just means that it takes longer. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has children, but she was 60 when she was nominated, and that's still starting from both the Harvard and Columbia law reviews. Sandra Day O'Connor managed to have children and get to the Court by 51, and she'd taken a more interesting, less fast-track route to nomination, but that was because O'Connor wasn't originally allowed on the fast track; she graduated third in her class from Stanford Law and no one would hire her as a lawyer. Future women nominees with careers like O'Connor's won't seem "qualified," because talented female lawyers are recruited to the inside track now. A nominee like Joan Roberts might manage to have both career and children, but only if she doesn't get married until she's 41 and then adopts her children rather than bearing them. (Oh, I'm sorry. That was John Roberts. Forget I said anything.)

If all of this seems abstract or hypothetical, consider the case of Judge Diane Wood, who was on the short list for each of Obama's Supreme Court nominations so far. Wood is eminently qualified, has three children, and got her law degree from the University of Texas rather than Harvard or Yale. But Judge Wood is already 59, and will be 60 on the Fourth of July. As pundit after pundit has opined over the last month, that's now considered problematically old.

Might we eventually see female nominees to the Court who've managed to build up intimidating qualifications by age 50 (or 52 or 48) and still had children? Of course. But it's a flat denial of reality to treat that profile as the rule and a profile like Sotomayor's or Kagan's as the exception. Kagan and Sotomayor are far more normal, and far more typical considering their professional circumstances. Elena Kagan became Dean of Harvard Law School when she was 43 years old. Apparently, some people (including a guy who became editor of The New Republic at 28) feel that this should be held against her. If she'd taken the time off (and I mean the minimum medical time) to start a family, she probably would not it have made it so far, so fast, and that would have been held against her, too. She has worked incredibly hard, drawing on formidable talents and resources, to make herself fit for national service, and faulting her for that is downright ungrateful.

Elena Kagan has no passions? Who are we kidding?