An ongoing review of politics and culture

Repo Men is Really, Really Bad

Honestly, there’s no other way to put it. There’s a scene at the end that’s so ill-conceived, over-the-top, bizarre, and repulsive that it sort of begs to be seen, if only to illustrate the incredible — and incredibly expensive — creative follies to which Hollywood can succumb. But by and large, it’s just an atrocious, stupid, shallow, and thoroughly uninteresting film.

03/18/10

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Poorly Drawn Cartoon of the Day

03/17/10

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Improbable Cause

A writer at The Corner has published a piece arguing that Irish Americans are uniquely victimized by a supposed racial slur that the left frequently uses. When liberals complain about McCarthyism, the blog post argues, they aren’t just invoking odious behavior by a long discredited political figure — they’re actually trafficking in bigoted, “reptilian” hate speech that transgresses against an entire ethnic group.

McCarthy is an ethnically identifiable Irish Catholic name, yet it describes despicable political behavior that transcends ethnic and religious backgrounds. No other American ethnic, religious, or racial group has been so stigmatized for so long, with so little public outcry, by a word that is acceptable in polite society.

“McCarthyism” is the second favorite epithet (after “fascism”) of liberals who would sooner donate money to Palin for President than utter a word that would violate political correctness (which, in Edmund Burke’s phrase, “feels a stain like a wound”). And yet this same sensitive, compassionate group still uses an Irish Catholic name as a term of abuse to describe political practices that are not unique to the Irish, to Catholics, or even to the late senator…

The fact that Irish Catholics did not immediately complain when the word was coined in 1950 by Herb Block, the hard-left cartoonist of the Washington Post, is a mystery to me. In any event, acceptance of the term “McCarthyism” by Irish Catholics over the decades is not proof that the word is legitimate; it only serves to demonstrate the truism that if you don’t get what you like in politics, you start liking what you get.

Is this a deadpan attempt at parody? I can scarcely believe that National Review is now publishing explicit calls for political correctness by an aggrieved representative of an ethnic group whose own members aren’t even offended by the speech in question.

In my lifetime, I doubt I’ve run across a single person who hears the word “McCarthyism” and thinks that the Irish people are thereby stigmatized, so it is no surprise that there is little public outcry, or that the word is accepted in polite society — it plainly alludes to the singularly odious behavior of an infamous man. When I complain that the conservative movement is too accepting of Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting, or that its members are too eager to attach the racist label to folks like Sonja Sotomayor, or that it’s weird when Andrew Breitbart darkly refers to the mostly Caucasian staff at Media Matters for America, I am told that I am overreacting. It is supposed to be understood that when folks on the right invoke race they are doing so ironically and strategically, turning the tables on leftists who’ve long used race as a cudgel. This misses the fact that it is always odious to use race or ethnicity as a tool to score political points, and underestimates how easily people segue from irony into cynicism when employing indefensible means for any end, even a noble one.

I’m unsure whether this nonsense about Irish American stigmatization is motivated by a misplaced, frankly absurd sense of ethnic grievance, or a desire to beat up liberals by calling them bigoted, or both. But I am sure that it is unhealthy for the conservative movement to keep channeling its inner liberal arts college activist. There is a perfectly heated debate to be had about McCarthyism, its history, and its contemporary resonance. It isn’t a debate that has anything to do with race. Given its poor performance among minority voters, is the conservative movement really well served by a flagship magazine that typically ignores identity issues, excoriates most instances of political correctness, and then chooses as a rare exception liberal bigotry against Irish Americans? It is defensible to do two of those things, but absurd and counterproductive to do all three.

by John Schwenkler

03/17/10

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Shades of Gray

I’m quite disinclined to insert myself into the middle of the Douthat-Larison discussion (see here, here, here, here, here, and also – whew! – here) of Hollywood’s depiction of U.S. foreign policy, but I do want to make one small point that deserves some emphasis: namely, that narrating the push for war in a way characterized by the right sorts* of sympathy for the motives and actions of those behind it has the capacity to serve a powerfully anti-war function, too, by reminding us that not all unjust wars are the product of greedy business executives and lies and backroom dealings among warmongering neocons in the DoD. This is not to say that the drive to war in Iraq wasn’t characterized by well more than its share of that sort of thing, but we do well to remember that even the best of intentions – which I can say with great confidence were had by a significant body of war supporters – don’t make an action right, and so that we can’t immediately discern the unjust wars from the just ones simply by scrutinizing the honesty or inner purity of those who would lead us into it. It’s for this reason, I think, that the “Bush lied, people died” account of the Iraq war can be so unhelpful: not because it’s false, and not just because it’s polarizing or lacking in tragedy or ambiguity, but because it gives the impression that the lying – which is not that uncommon, mind you – was the primary place where things went wrong, whereas in reality the war in question would have been unjust and disastrously executed even if everyone had been perfectly forthright about why we were getting into it.

Addendum: I should emphasize that “right sorts” is doing quite a lot of work here, since in a world where good intentions are commonly thought to excuse the wrong sorts of sympathy for certain of its subjects will quickly make one’s film into an anti-war one. It may just be that the lack of historical distance makes it impossible, or at least nearly so, to strike the appropriate balance; thus Christopher Browning’s account of the German draftees who carried out the “Final Solution” in Poland helps us see that these were men just like us without giving us any inclination to think that Nazism might not have been so bad after all, whereas any filmmaker’s attempt to sympathize with Bush & Co. will immediately be seized on by certain factions as a film that shows how the war was really all right. If this is all that Daniel is saying, then perhaps we don’t actually disagree.

03/17/10

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Notes Towards a Policy Platform: Part VI - deferred

My last topic was going to be education, but I need to pick up my son. And, unfortunately, I won’t have time later. And starting tomorrow I’m taking Robert McKee’s famous Story Seminar, so I won’t have any time to write.

And I need to do more work before writing about education. This is a topic where I know more than most of what I yabber about, given my involvement on the board of a charter school, but precisely because I know more I almost know too much to be really coherent. And, as well, I feel like I haven’t fully grappled with Diane Ravitch’s latest arguments on the subject, and since nobody knows more than she does I really can’t open my mouth until I’ve figured out where I agree with her and, when I disagree, why.

So this topic is deferred, but not abandoned.

Oh, and in answer to your unspoken question: yes, I finished the screenplay (2 drafts), and yes, that’s why I suddenly am doing a bunch of blogging. Not promising to continue at this pace; indeed, I suspect that when I start getting feedback, and see what I need to change, I’m going to drop off the face of the earth again. Or, if I don’t need to make major changes to this screenplay, when I start working on the next one (which could be pretty soon).

But I’m back for now. And when I leave again, I won’t be gone for good.

And now, if anyone knows a producer they’d be willing to introduce me to . . .

03/17/10

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Notes Towards a Policy Platform: Part V

Another short one: Infrastructure.

Notice how President Obama and a variety of talking heads said a lot during the stimulus debate about infrastructure projects, but almost none of that money has been disbursed? Notice that China seems to be able to build entire cities faster than we can build a single skyscraper in New York? Think that might be a problem?

We’ve come a long way from the days of Robert Moses. The local regulatory net that entangles any effort at development is not exclusively a left- or right-wing phenomenon; generally, what it’s about is protecting economic incumbents without regard to ideology in any larger sense, to say nothing of any public interest. The result is not only to stifle development but to wildly raise costs because of lack of competition. Nobody wants to get into the game unless they have a lot of political chits and very deep pockets. Lack of competition means that the few who are in a position to play can now hold up the local administration for a variety of “incentives” to bother to build the project they wanted to build in the first place. Other “incentives” are provided to local interest groups to buy their acquiescence in the project. Then once ground is broken and the public is desperate just to get the project done, the project is changed – costs to the public go up while the public benefit goes down as the project is scaled down in various ways. All of this feeds further opposition to development.

I wish I knew the solution to this problem. But I have a suspicion as to one part of the solution: streamline democratic accountability and create incentives for functioning political competition.

When it’s not clear who is responsible for these kinds of decisions, you practically guarantee local regulatory capture by parochial interests, whether these are NIMBY types out to block development or incumbent developers out to stop competition. And when you don’t have functional political competition (which is the case in many urban areas that are effectively one-party states) there is limited incentive for public officials to effectively tend to the public interest. This is one reason I’d like to see an effective Republican party in the Northeast.

At a Federal level, though, I don’t know how much one can do about these problems. They are a huge impediment to effective public spending on infrastructure, though.

03/17/10

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Notes Towards a Policy Platform: Part IV

Short one: immigration.

I live in New York City. New York City is really crowded. Most of the country isn’t. We have plenty of room to grow, and if we want to amortize our debt effectively, we should do it over a modestly growing population.

But we need a population that is more productive. Right now, we’re selecting our immigrant population very peculiarly. We strictly limit the number of highly-skilled immigrants. Unskilled immigrants who sneak in we harass and generally leave vulnerable to economic exploitation and other suffering, but we don’t do much of anything punish the exploiters.

It seems to me that a very simple way of cutting the Gordian knot of immigration would be to auction visas.

Each year, Congress would set the number of visas available for auction. They would then go up for bid by anybody. With a visa in hand, anybody who passed some form of security check to make sure you’re not a criminal, spy, terrorist, etc. would be permitted to reside in the U.S.A. for the duration of the visa, and work, study – whatever.

NGOs could purchase visas for political or economic refugees. Employers could purchase visas for desired employees. Universities could purchase visas for desired students. Individuals could purchase their own visas to do whatever.

Work here without a valid visa? Somebody’s defrauded the government; you should have purchased that visa at auction. There’s really no good excuse for not having one. Sanctions could be split between the individual and the employer according to some formula. Take the whole question out of the hands of the INS and give it to the IRS, who seem to get better results generally.

With such a system in place, I think you’d immediately see an uptick in the average skill level of the immigrant population. The economy would benefit from reduced labor market friction. And the American people would get the benefit of the revenue from the auctions, which would offset the socialized transaction costs of absorbing immigrants.

The United States is anomalous relative to other countries that are generally open to immigration (e.g., Canada, Australia) in paying negligible attention to trying to attract skilled immigrants. Rather than having the government decide who we need to bring in, this is basically a proposal to let the market decide.

03/17/10

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Notes Towards a Policy Platform: Part III

Let’s talk taxes.

We’re going to have to raise them.

There: I said it. You can’t borrow as much money as we’ve borrowed in the last decade, and are going to borrow in the next decade, and expect to simply grow out of it, not with a mature economy like ours. The Federal Government is going to have to raise more revenue.

Now, if that’s the case, and if we’re not simply going to settle for lower growth and a spiral into stagnation, we’re going to have to pay much more attention to the efficiency of our tax system.

The most economically efficient tax out there, meaning the one that is creates the least distortion and the least dead loss, is a value-added tax. There’s a limit to how high you can raise a VAT without creating a black market. But right now, in the U.S.A., the rate is zero. It could be higher. It should be.

The VAT is usually hated by progressives because it’s regressive. Which it is. But spending is generally progressive, and the overall level of spending is up and is going to stay up. And if we cut military spending, and spend more on health care for children and less on the (relatively wealthier) elderly, then our spending priorities are getting more progressive.

Personally, I’d like to see the payroll tax eliminated and replaced by a VAT. The payroll tax is a tax on employment; currently we have very high unemployment. Seems to me we should be doing everything we can to encourage employment. Moreover, paying payroll taxes is a major incentive for individuals to hire other individuals on the books. The VAT is much harder to evade. We’d effectively be bringing a big chunk of the underground economy onto the books. Finally, the employees most willing to be paid off the books are those who are themselves off the books – i.e., illegal immigrants. Not only would replacing the payroll tax with a VAT directly bring this underground part of the economy under the tax umbrella, it would reduce an incentive for employers to hire illegals, and eliminate an incentive for illegals themselves to remain undocumented (currently, going on the books could well mean an after-tax pay cut).

In the income tax code, we need to see a revival of the Spirit of ’86: close loopholes, broaden the base, and lower rates. I think the conservative enthusiasm for lowering the top rate is misguided today; top rates aren’t at 70%, to say nothing of 90%. Rather, we should lower the whole curve, and simplify the code as much as possible. The mortgage interest deduction is long overdue for trimming. If we could eliminate the corporate income tax entirely, and raise capital gains rates to be equal to regular income tax rates, I’d be thrilled, though that would potentially create some very perverse incentives to turn everything into a corporation and provide sole employees a wide array of in-kind benefits. But the general direction that I would take the tax code should be clear: eliminate taxes that are disincentives to employment or investment; eliminate loopholes; simplify the code; and raise the overall amount of revenue to the Federal Government by instituting a VAT. The overall goal: a tax system that encourages capital formation, that generates more revenue than our current system at a lower cost in terms of tax-avoiding malinvestment, compliance costs, and so forth.

03/17/10

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Notes Towards a Policy Platform: Part II

Larger than military spending looms the specter of massive, out-of-control entitlement spending, primarily spending on health care.

President Obama’s proposed health reform was sold, initially, in large part as a way to control this spending. That’s the biggest reason why it’s proven at best tepidly popular: because controlling spending means taking something away from current recipients.

A variety of advocates have tried to explain that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, but these protests have convinced almost no one. With good reason: dramatic improvements in an industry’s efficiency produced by government mandate are not our usual experience of the world.

As smarter advocates have pointed out, the biggest driver of the high price of American health care is simply that we pay providers more than other countries. American doctors rightly perceive that, relative to their own historical experience, they are doing worse and worse – and relative to other options for people with their cognitive capabilities (Wall Street, say) they are doing wildly worse. The idea that the “problem” with American medicine is that they are still paid too much strikes them as simply mad.

But there’s another way to slice the same data. We spend more than any other country on health care, for broadly comparable results. But we spend hugely more than comparable countries on health care for the elderly, specifically. If you compare spending on routine, preventative care for the young, not so much.

The challenge, then, is not so much to figure out how to pay doctors less but how to change the employment mix of the medical profession as part of an overall reorientation of our medical spending modestly away from the elderly (who will inevitably consume the lion’s share of health-care dollars) and towards the rest of the population.

It’s obvious why this would be wildly unpopular. The elderly vote reliably; kids don’t vote at all. The elderly are also much whiter on average than the young. To be blunt about it, while grandma may well want good health care for her granddaughter, she may not feel as strongly about the daughter of her home-health aid.

But, like I said, this isn’t a post about the politics of the matter; it’s about what we need to do to face our competition. Poor health care for young people and working-age people is a big problem. It makes a material contribution to the poor educational outcomes among the poor, which in turn results in the entrenchment of poverty with wider negative social and economic consequences. The tie between employment and healthcare produces labor market rigidities, inhibits entrepreneurship among the non-rich, has strangled a number of old industrial corporations – it’s a huge problem.

Meanwhile, on the subject of entitlements more generally, the expectation of a comfortable retirement in one’s early 60s is not tenable in a world of longer life expectancies. Most people are going to have to die sooner or work longer. I think people should work longer.

My own inclination is to say that Obama’s health-care proposal is a step in the right direction, the kind of reform that would make it easier for a subsequent Republican administration to reform it in a direction that will be more open to the kinds of price signals that drive medical innovation and, in turn, actually lower costs. Such reforms are essentially impossible until a functional individual insurance market is created, and the Obama health-care plan, if it works, promises to create such a market. That’s a big “if” – but if it doesn’t create a functional individual insurance market, then it will fail, and the citizenry, rather than demanding repeal, will demand that it be changed to make that market work. (Or to eliminate the insurance industry, which I wouldn’t be averse to if you could create a system where price signals reached the consumer in some fashion, something like the DeLong plan.)

And speaking of the DeLong plan: I want to highlight one paragraph from same:

Sin taxes (and, perhaps, someday general revenues) pay for an army of barefoot doctors and nurses and mobile treatment vans roaming the country, knocking on doors, and providing preventive and other long-run lifestyle services for free: Let me examine your prostate. Mind if I check your refrigerator and tell you how to eat healthier? Have you exercised today? I’m a Pilates instructor, and we could do a session now? Are you up on your immunizations? Anybody here have a fever and need antibiotics? Come on out to the van and I’ll clean your teeth.” The idea is to make the preventive care cheaper-than-free, to insure that nothing with a high long-run benefit/cost ratio gets left undone because people would rather get a bigger check the next April to use to buy an HDTV.

That army of barefoot doctors and nurses and so forth? Would they be members of 1199? Or, even more likely, AFSCME? I ask because I like the idea a lot – it’s exactly the kind of paternalistic initiative I tend to go for – but I want to get some idea of what kind of insane long-term costs we’re going to be locking in with this initiative?

03/17/10

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Notes Towards a Policy Platform: Part I

Per my last post: these are notes towards a policy platform that are not remotely intended to be “smart” things for a political party to advocate. Rather, they’re an outline of what I think we need to do as a nation to prepare for the more competitive world we are in.

Military Spending

As the “lone superpower” the United States spends truly astonishing amounts on our military. We’re not entirely in a class by ourselves on a percentage basis, but we spend far more as a percentage of GDP than any other rich country, and hugely more than any other country on an total dollar basis. For all intents and purposes, not only do we have the world’s greatest navy and airforce, we have the world’s only navy and airforce. There’s no material competition.

Military spending is largely a dead loss to the economy. Yes, you get valuable civilian spinoffs from military research, but this research is a tiny component of overall military spending, and it’s not obvious why you wouldn’t get a better result spending directly on civilian research; presumably you would. Ditto for the addition to GDP from spending as such; we’d be better off spending on something productive. If we’re in a more economically competitive world, where productivity matters a great deal, we can’t ignore the size of the military sector as something holding us back.

The biggest component of our spending is on manpower. People are expensive, well-trained people are even more expensive, and you can’t have a big standing army without lots of well-trained people. Even if we eliminated the most expensive weapons systems, we’d have a hugely expensive military.

And yet, as we discovered in our two current wars, we are understaffed for our current mission. We did not have sufficient manpower available to effectively prosecute the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

What that means to me is that our current mission is not sustainable.

How we might change our foreign policy depends greatly on whether we believe we have a genuine and enduring commonality of interests with our major allies.

Right now, none of our major allies is permitted a materially independent foreign policy, and they largely cannot pursue one because they are too small to matter and/or their militaries are not organized for independent action, as opposed to action under NATO auspices. That’s by design, but it creates very little incentive for any of our allies to develop real substantial military capabilities. Many European militaries are basically arms of the welfare state; the age structure and occupation breakdown of their armed forces is transparently absurd. They may spend 1-2% of GDP on their militaries, but they cannot actually conduct military operations of any kind.

That could change. The European Union could develop into a real military power. They are certainly rich enough and populous enough, collectively, to do so. Currently, they lack the necessary institutions for collective decisionmaking, but those could certainly develop. There is certainly a substantial elite constituency for developing such institutions.

America has historically discouraged such a development, particularly but not exclusively in the military sphere. We have been consistent advocates of making the EU as broad as possible, but generally opponents of making it as deep as possible.

If we believe that a truly united Europe would have policy goals broadly in-line with American goals, then it might make sense for us to change this stance, to move from a position where we try to police the world ourselves to one where we have genuine allies who can pull their own weight. Of course, if they can pull their own weight, then they won’t take dictation. Indeed, they’ll expect us to toe their line as much as we toe theirs.

If we don’t believe there is an overall harmony of objectives, then the alternative is reducing the scope of our ambitions. This will probably ultimately land us in the same position, with a united Europe as a new major power, because an America with a reduced horizon is going to be less likely to intimidate European elites from their own ambitions. But the route will be different, and perhaps slower.

The real question, it seems to me, is: who do we have more concerns about, our allies or our adversaries? NATO, it was once said, was supposed to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. If we have to choose, metaphorically, between letting the Russians in, or letting the Germans get up, which is more worrisome?

Regardless of the answer, this, from a spending perspective, strikes me as the key question we need to be asking ourselves. Because if we can’t answer this question intelligently with respect to Europe, we haven’t a prayer of answering it intelligently with respect to Japan, or India, or China, or any of the other major powers with whom we’re going to have to share global responsibility in the future.

03/17/10

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Something in Reserve

Matt Yglesias writes more than a post per day about how he doesn’t understand why the Fed isn’t being more aggressive at easing to further reduce unemployment, or why we can’t simply devalue our currency against the renminbi, or why we don’t set a higher inflation target, or other topics related to monetary and exchange rate policy.

I understand where Matt’s coming from, and I don’t want to discount the possibility, which he raises frequently, that this is all a matter of class interests. But on the admittedly idealistic assumption that everyone involved is actually trying to look out for the national interest, here’s one reason why we might be acting more cautiously than he would like.

The dollar remains the predominant world reserve currency. As such, the U.S. government benefits from the ability to issue debt at a lower interest rate than would otherwise be the case, and the rest of the U.S. economy benefits in turn from this subsidy.

It will not always remain so. The United States’ percentage of the global economy will inevitably shrink over the next generation, as the mega-nations of China and India, along with Brazil and perhaps other nations (Russia? Turkey? Iran? Vietnam?) begin to realize their considerable upside economic potential. Regardless of whether Europe and Japan stagnate, and whether the United States regains the growth trend it was on prior to the recent crisis, at a certain point it is no longer going to be tenable for much of the world to transact in dollars or to subsidize American borrowing.

What will replace the dollar is a real question; most likely it will be no single other currency but a basket thereof, or a supra-national construct pegged to such a basket. But regardless of what replaces the dollar and how, eventually Americans are going to lose the benefits of being issuers of the global reserve currency.

But many factors will affect the timing of this shift, and one of them is the perception in foreign capitals of how serious America is about protecting the value of its currency. I don’t happen to think that markets are so skittish that an announcement of a 4% inflation target, say, would result in a run on the dollar. But I do think it would be a sufficiently significant departure from past practice as to raise real questions about the long-term prospects for dollar debt holdings. Which, in turn, would lead to an acceleration of the process of unwinding the dollar as global reserve currency.

Again: this is inevitable. It’s going to happen one day either way. But when it happens, it’ll cost us something in terms of diminished growth. So we rationally want to delay the inevitable.

A more aggressive effort to raise the rate of inflation in America, or to devalue the dollar against, particularly, the yen and renminbi, could indeed result in higher nominal growth in the United States, and hence lower unemployment. But it could also result in a more rapid move away from the dollar as a reserve currency, with a resulting rise in borrowing costs over and above the expected effect from higher expected inflation, and a cost in terms of lower long-term growth for the U.S. economy.

Which policy is optimal? That’s a judgment call; even in retrospect, we probably won’t agree on the answer. But the policy mix we’ve got now – a big spike in government debt and short rates at zero, but not actually maxing out the credit card and trying to end extraordinary monetary actions like quantitative easing as early as possible – doesn’t strike me as a crazy one. The distribution effects of the policy should be disturbing to someone with Matt’s political commitments – but that might be something we need to tackle some other way than by throwing caution to the winds on monetary policy.

Ultimately, I think the debate about whether the inflation target or the exchange rate should be here or there is somewhat off the most important point. The important point is that a shift away from the dollar is inevitable, and we should be preparing for a day in which it is relatively more expensive to borrow abroad than it is today, and where we have to generate more capital at home.

Does that mean we need to borrow less today? Not at all. You borrow when rates are low. Rates are now low.

What it does mean is that we need to be much more attentive to how we invest the money that we’re currently borrowing.

Both the United States and China spent a lot of money on economic stimulus during the recession. But the character of that spending was and is very different. The American stimulus was composed of things like tax cuts to boost consumer spending at the margin, assistance to the unemployed and poor for similar purpose (and to alleviate acute suffering), aid to the states to forestall layoffs of government workers, and so forth. China’s stimulus focused on rolling out to the interior provinces and second-tier cities the kind of infrastructure development they’ve already executed in the higher-income coastal regions. America borrowed from the future to keep people afloat today – which is good, because it is much more expensive to climb out of a hole than to avoid falling in. But China is investing in the future, their internal market. As the coast gets wealthier, it will move up the value chain, producing more and more valuable products for export; as the interior develops, low-wage manufacturing will move inland, exporting not only abroad but to the coastal regions, and importing higher-value products from the coastal regions rather than predominantly from abroad.

The United States can’t do what China is doing. We don’t have a deeply impoverished hinterland to develop, Mississippi and West Virginia notwithstanding. But there is still plenty we could do – in terms of changes to our tax code, to public investment priorities, to regulatory regimes, to to our immigration policy, to our education and health delivery systems – to prepare for a more competitive world, a world in which we will have to generate roughly the same amount of capital we deploy, rather than importing it from abroad.

I don’t get the sense that, in general, this is where the Obama Administration’s heart is, though the Administration definitely has some ideas. That said, it’s abundantly clear that the Republic Party as an institution is incapable of even thinking coherently about this kind of question. There are some smart guys out there writing papers and things, but the political leadership is completely incapable of even asking coherent questions about America’s future, much less answering them. Rather, the party is committed to a strategy of incoherent populist rage coupled with interest-group logrolling. It is hard for me to recall a time when I saw less to like about the G.O.P., and yes, I include the Bush years in that assessment. The Democrats seem wrong to me about a whole bunch of things. The Republicans are not even wrong.

Assuming I can keep focused, I’ll try to frame my own thinking on some of the areas I mention above in a series of posts. Consider them notes towards a policy platform for a party that does not currently exist.

03/17/10

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Recommendations Game

Apropos of Suderman’s last: here’s another game. What books are you most likely to recommend to others that they read?

The point of the game is to chuck out the stuff that both everybody knows is great and therefore tells them nothing about either you or the relevant work (“one of my favorite movies is ‘The Godfather’”) and the stuff that may have profoundly affected you but that most people won’t care about (“Frank Moore Cross’ ‘Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic’ was the book that convinced me to abandon my original plan to become an underwater welder and instead pursue a PhD in bible criticism”), leaving you only with those works that lots of people you meet or know might be interested in if only they knew about them.

My way-too-quickly-constructed-list of novels, nonfiction books (including memoir and biography), and movies, limiting myself to five of each.

NOVELS:

Housekeeping, by Marilyn Robinson. Robinson is what a truly great stylist ought to be: someone whose style you don’t even notice until you think about it. This is also one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read, and similarly, you won’t even notice it’s terrifying until you stop and think about it.

The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro. This dreamlike doorstop about a conductor on tour in an unnamed central European country for a concert is a bit of a personal favorite, and I keep recommending it to people who don’t wind up finishing it. I’m not going to stop, though; it’s just too wonderful a book.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, by G. B. Edwards. By contrast, everyone I’ve ever recommended this first-person novel about a man born and raised on the island of Guernsey to has fallen in love with it. You won’t want to part with this very distinctive voice, and the funny thing is that nobody even knows who wrote it.

The Bat Poet, by Randall Jarrell. “A bat is born, naked and blind and pale . . .” Technically a children’s book, both an instructive book about poetry, and a delightful book of poems, and a touching book about being a poet.

Watership Down, by Richard Adams. Actually, enough people I’ve recommended this one to have already read it that it probably doesn’t deserve to be on this list, but boy is it a fabulous book.

NONFICTION BOOKS:

Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, by Yossi Klein Halevy. The memoir of a man who has really thought about his life. Which is true of surprisingly few of them. Plus, one of the more insightful books I know about a particular kind of American Jew, a kind that has had more than a little influence on recent history.

Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, by Stanley Cavell. Proof that you can be profoundly influenced by a book you read in your late 30s. I’m recommending this to everybody who would ever consider reading a book of literary criticism. The essays on Lear and Othello are still ringing in me.

Rites of Spring, by Modris Eksteins. The first book of cultural history that I ever read, and I don’t think I’ve read one since that measured up. A tour-de-force interpretation of modernism as a cultural phenomenon, its origins and its consequences.

A Worker in a Worker’s State, by Miklos Haraszti. A book that deeply moved me in college, a rare instance of what I’d have to call romantic left-wing criticism of Communism by someone actually from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Democracy and Distrust, by John Hart Ely. A bit of an odd-man out in this collection, but Ely’s book, which I read in college, was probably the best effort to make sense of our liberal constitutional order with minimal resource to eternal verities metaphorically handed down from Sinai. Still worth grappling with.

MOVIES:

“Babe: Pig in the City.” Imagine Taxi Driver directed by David Lynch . . . as a kids’ movie. Yeah. But there are scenes in it that will absolutely break your heart. (“Thank you for waiting.”)

“Vanya on 42nd Street.” The best production of Chekhov I’ve ever seen, and some of the best acting by a phenomenal cast led by Wallace Shawn and Julianne Moore. Plus the most creative use of an intermission in a cinematic treatment of a play.

“Flirting With Disaster.” A very personal movie for me, but also riotously funny. Deserves to be placed alongside the great Hollywood comedies of the 1940s. (In fact, I wonder if Stanley Cavell has seen it . . .)

(Wow – three movies from the 1990s? Yikes . . .)

“After Hours.” Never ceases to amaze me how many people haven’t seen this one. Scorsese’s hate-letter to Manhattan and the entire downtown movie aesthetic. Will give you nightmares, but your nightmares won’t be as entertaining.

“One-Two-Three.” Another one I’m amazed so many people haven’t seen. Jimmy Cagney in Billy Wilder’s Cold War comedy about a Coca Cola executive in Berlin out to conquer the Russian market just before the Wall goes up. “Is everybody corrupt?” “I don’t know everybody.”

Whittling these down to five each wasn’t easy, let me tell you. If I did this again next week, I’d probably make a different list. But hey, the above are all really, really worth reading/seeing. So no regrets.

03/17/10

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For those wearing the green today . . .

Check out Ireland’s new national anthem".

by Peter Suderman

03/17/10

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A Hastily Compiled, Non-Definitive List of Books That Have Influenced Me

Tyler Cowen has posted a list of books which influenced him the most, and, on Twitter, Mr. Gobry has asked for similar lists from TAS contributors. Happy to oblige! I’m not sure if the books below are truly the absolute most influential in my life, but they’re certainly the ones that immediately stick out in my mind as having stuck with me over time.

Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury: I’ve always been a little perplexed by the book’s reputation as a defense of free speech. It is, of course, but that’s not its most important point by far. Instead, it’s a novel about mental debilitation and loss of empathy induced by media overload — in particular, overload on shallow, visual, electronic media. It’s also a novel about the love of stories, and the way written stories in particular can provide humans with meaning, purpose, and escape; by the book’s end, the hero joins an outcast community in which individuals devote themselves not only to learning works of literature, but to immersing themselves in them, fusing their identities with these works and, in a sense, becoming them. For reasons that should be obvious, I’ve long found this wonderful and tremendously appealing.

Videohound’s Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics: Before the Internet, and thus before easy access to IMDB and the rest of the digital cinemaverse, cinephiles had to rely on incomplete reference books in order to familiarize themselves with back catalog films. For years, I poured over Videohounds’ cult film guide almost daily, and its sensibility — a quirky mix of giddy, passionate, erudite, snarky, and critical — helped shape my appreciation of and attitude toward pulp ever since.

The Caves of Steel — Isaac Asimov: As an eight year old first reading the book, I loved Asimov’s cleverly constructed murder mystery story, and as an already-devoted sci-fi geek (Star Trek was a staple in my household), I loved the intricate future world Asimov designed even more. But what stuck with me most was the slightly detached, slightly cranky, cerebral-but-not-stuck-up quality of both the detective protagonist, Elijah Baley, and the storytelling itself. As with most of Asimov’s characters (and, as I understand, Asimov himself), Baley was a hyper self-aware invert somewhat vexed by people and social situations, but who solved problems by thinking them through as thoroughly as possible and accepting whatever results, often imperfect, came of this method. Perhaps to my detriment, I related to this quite a bit and found it a useful model for understanding human relations.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns — Frank Miller: I got my first copy of this at nine or ten years old, and I literally read and reread it until it fell apart (for a while I held it together with duct tape, but eventually I lost so many pages that it was no longer worth saving). Miller’s fusion of gruff noir sentiment and comic book action helped define the way I think about pop art and genre storytelling; sure, it’s low culture — frequently crude and base — but it’s executed with such verve that it somehow makes it into the upper middlebrow (or near enough) anyway.

Ender’s Game — Orson Scott Card: Speaking of hyper-cerebral! Scott Card’s later books descend into a near-parody of the Asimovian worldview, with protagonists who presume (and act upon) an absurdly concrete and knowable understanding of human behavior. But while you can find hints of this in Ender’s Game, it works anyway, in large part because of the young age of its heroes. These days, I prefer the first two sequels, Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, both of which are more mature in their outlook. But the original is the one I’ve read most often, and the one I think of most.

The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger: Yes, another novel about a social outcast who spends too much time in his head. But it’s a classic for a reason, and an enduring portrait of adolescent questioning.

American Pastoral — Philip Roth: Probably the finest work of prose in the bunch, and arguably also the most mature, it’s one of those novels that’s both impressive and gripping — not only do you admire it, but you can’t stop flipping pages as you do.

You may have noticed that except for the Videohound guide, it’s all fiction. For a reason! While I read a lot of magazine-length nonfiction, I read very little in the way of nonfiction books. And what I have read came later: In my formative, pre-college years, I probably read fewer than a dozen non-fiction books (not counting school text books, although I suppose I didn’t actually read most of those either). It’s not that nonfiction books haven’t influenced me — think of obvious libertarian touchstones: The Road to Serfdom, The Law, Capitalism and Freedom, The Calculus of Consent — but I read them most of them post-college and, as a result, I suppose I don’t feel like they’re really, well… as much a part of me in the Fahrenheit 451 sense.

by James Poulos

03/16/10

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Bumper Sticker

DOWN WITH THE DEEMOCRATS

by James Poulos

03/16/10

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Nothing Is Written, Even In Code

Catching up on Ross this morning after writing yesterday’s account at Pomocon of how technology really threatens (small-l) liberalism was a nice synergy, if by no means a destiny. For Ross has excerpted a fascinating but awful mental exercise, by a particularly futurist David Gelernter, that shows even better than I could hint what loomed behind the themes of my own, closer-to-the-ground account.

For the sake of conversation, I will limit myself to five points:

1. Gelernter’s cheery fatalism on the private machines-vs-Cloud debate unnerves me greatly. It’s not that I hope for, or would fight for, a world without clouds. But I do hope for, and might even fight for, a world without a Cloud.

2. The Cloud problem is itself merely a symptom of Gelernter’s insistence on seeing the internet as a single, universal System — driven, as I suggested at Pomocon, by a captivation with the vast possibilities unleashed by treating the internet as a System. This element of geek psychology is a serious problem — less because the field of human possibilities can and should be dramatically reduced, and more because I detect, paradoxically, a failure of the imagination among geeks who gravitate with such pubescent enthusiasm to technological unitarian universalism. I’m profoundly unconvinced that the possibility-maximizing framework is, and must be, the unitary and universalist one.

3. This is to leave aside the whole issue of the inadequacy of our theory of possibility itself. Gelernter is hard on today’s internet for greatly increasing the quantity of information and transactions without increasing their quality. For some, quantity IS quality, or is quality’s main ingredient; Gelernter would therefore seem not to be one of these people, but his relentless fantasizing about our uni-uni System Destiny seems to me to undermine our confidence that this is the case. There are imported assumptions about what a possibility IS that need to be, in the parlance of our times, ‘unpacked’ and ‘interrogated’.

4. The revealing characteristic about the fantasy that there can be a singularity — the point at which the uni-uni System Destiny is consummated or realized — is its apparent inability to theorize possibility outside the frame of destiny itself. We are told repeatedly, and I think exclusively, that the singularity can exist only because it must. Any causal theory of omnipossibility that requires destiny already fails, doesn’t it? What’s more, any theory of possibility that imagines it even possible for all possibilities to be contained within a single system depends on the logically defective assumption that no possibility requires system plurality, or at least binarity. At least some possibilities are being excluded from any uni-uni System that contains even all the possibilities that an open-ended number of human beings can experience ever.

5. This implies that our experience as human beings points to the realization that the scope of experience is of necessity narrower than the scope of possibility. Though this realization has fueled secular unitarian universalist projects since Saint-Simon, Comte, and Hegel — if possibility must be limited even when it functions for us as infinite, then why not opt for the System? — there are well-known problems that re-present them in this post-internet context. The model for a unitary universal system of dramatically limited possibility is, of course, Biblical creation and the Biblical God. The attempt to escape the good judgment of God — both as a consequence of our being and its cause — leaves us with two choices: the judgment of particular humans and the judgment of the System. The destiny theory of singularity ultimately fails because it claims that the System Destiny has already escaped the good judgment of the particular humans who have created the system — in other words, that the singularity has already happened in the future, has come back to the present from the future to make itself happen. Whose standard of good judgment would ratify this as our best point of departure for figuring out what to do with the internet?

03/15/10

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Send Audio Files Instead!

Strangely, the head of Detroit’s school board is incapable of composing a grammatically correct sentence. Nevertheless it seems he communicates regularly by e-mail.

03/15/10

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What About the Innocents?

Over at True/Slant, I rebut the latest from Andrew McCarthy, the National Review writer who is one step away from declaring the lawyers for Gitmo detainees to be enemy combatants.

An excerpt:

Andrew McCarthy continues to write as though every detainee ever held at Guantanamo Bay is a member of al Qaeda. Nowhere does he acknowledge that some people designated as enemy combatants by the Bush Administration were actually innocent, or that some of the lawyers he is maligning deserve credit for helping to free innocent men. Had Mr. McCarthy’s preferred policies remained in effect, these innocent men would still be rotting in a Gitmo prison cell today. In that way, he transgresses against the core American principle that all men are endowed by their creator with an inalienable right to liberty.

Mr. McCarthy’s writing on detainee issues would be far more intellectually honest if he acknowledged rather than elided the existence of these innocent people.

The rest is here. It tackles specific passages in recent posts by Mr. McCarthy, and quotes him making one of the most odious statements I’ve ever seen in mainstream political discourse. His rhetoric is getting so extreme that even Mark Levin can’t believe it.

by Matt Feeney

03/13/10

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