How many chances should government get?
Is it even worth trying to get Haiti right?
The Washington Post reports that at an international donor conference today, the U.S. will pledge $1 billion to reconstruct the Haitian government as part of an international effort to rebuild the earthquake-ravaged state. The U.S. has a long history of such aid to Haiti — roughly $4 billion since 1990 — with, admittedly, little clear lasting impact to show. Yet as the Post article notes, “this time, U.S. officials say, they will do things differently.”
Of course this is a common refrain every time someone wants to try something that was unsuccessful in the past. Yet two decades of failure should leave us, at the very least, skeptical of the U.S. government’s ability to get it right. So how many chances should it get? At what point should we say, even if the goal of reconstructing Haiti is right, our inability to do it means the policy is wrong?
Is political science relevant?
Over at True/Slant, Ryan Sager asks why so many pundits, political consultants, journalists, and politicians ignore political science… Why are experts regularly consulted in fields like economics, sports, or health, but not in politics?
Sager’s best guess is that political science tells us that much of politics is simply out of our control – political events and trends occur according to economic conditions and other sets of unpredictable stimuli, and to admit these basic truths would put the 24/7 news cycle out of business. The average citizen knows / cares nothing about most policy questions, but those inside the Beltway must pretend as if they’re tied to Congress’s every move.
In other words, the findings of political science run contrary to the inherent interests of the politics “business”… What do we make of this?
-Colin
Internal contestation
Why dissent ought to be encouraged – but isn’t
Today conservative author and Bush speechwriter David Frum parted ways with the American Enterprise Institute, a leading right-of-center think tank. Speculation has been rampant throughout the day, but the latest updates indicate that Frum’s reason for leaving was money, not an ideological purge. Frum has won a reputation for reasonableness and objectivity among moderates and liberals for breaking ranks with Fox News and for his willingness to openly criticize the Republican Party.
Many believed that Frum’s recent CNN article, in which he argued that Republicans were unwise to universally lambast the health care reform bill(s), was the last straw for AEI, which is perceived by many have strayed from a more market-based moderate conservatism toward an ideological, movement-based model.
Google vs. China
What should Google do about China’s insistence on internet censorship? The world has been watching this evolving conflict with great interest.
If Google continues to stand up to China, it may lose highly lucrative partnerships with Chinese companies. But China loses each day it goes without the world’s #1 search engine and draws ever more attention to its oppressive information policies.
What I find particularly interesting about this is how this negotiation, involving some of our most sacred political rights, is going on not between governments or advocacy organizations, but by a corporation. Hey, money talks. And when it does, even the most stubborn regimes listen.
-Colin
Fish on Pragmatism
In today’s episode of “FishWatch”, I’d like to point you to Stanley Fish’s most recent essay at the New York Times, which deals with pragmatism. Not the pragmatism we’ve so often discussed in this blog (i.e. the preference of the possible over the ideal, the concrete over the abstract, etc), but the related philosophical tradition by the same name.
As Fish explains:
Pragmatism’s basic move is to declare that the answers to [philosophical] questions will not be found by identifying some transcendental universal and then conforming ourselves to its normative demands (like “Be ye perfect”). Rather, we must, and can, make do with the “ordinary aptitudes of human beings (ourselves) viewed within a generously Darwinized ecology, without transcendental, revelatory, or privileged presumptions of any kind.” (quotes from Joseph Margolis’s new book, Pragmatism’s Advantage)
Pragmatism lowers our epistemological and moral gaze to ground level, eschewing appeals to absolute truth or objectivity. It also reassures is that all is not lost, suggesting that our “truths” have always been contingent and provisional in this way, and we’ve gone on advancing in science and ethics just fine…
Public philosophy 4 kidz, continued
Last week, Marc asked whether there should be a mandatory “public philosophy” or “civics” course for high schoolers, especially given low rates of constitutional and philosophical literacy.
With all that is going on right now in education, including new recommendations from the Obama Administration, a school board fiasco in Texas, a tug-of-war between charter, private, and public schools, and widespread financial panic as all levels try to cut back, the importance of philosophy is likely to get lost in the chaos.
But as philosopher Stephen Law writes in The War for Children’s Minds, students have a lot to gain from even a small dose of philosophy, particularly with regard to critical thinking, logic, and ethics. Too many of us grow up learning lots of whats and hows and wheres but very few whys – and in the U.S., religion often fills that normative void. Law argues that the basic tools of philosophy serve as valuable resources for use in other disciplines and much-need insulation against the many bad arguments, deceptions, and fallacies that will be thrown there way as adults (particularly when it comes to politics).
While I have quite substantial doubts of these recommendations being enacted – if anything, we’ll probably see LESS philosophy in schools and more concrete job preparation – I can’t think of anything more important in a democracy than teaching citizens to think carefully and deeply about politics, ethics, and the social world.
-Colin
Education back on the table
This weekend, President Obama released plans for an overhaul of “No Child Left Behind,” including $4 billion in funding for schools nationwide. It’s hard to make out the details at this point, but it looks like we’ll see a shift from punishments to grants, and from expansive testing standards to college prep.
Meanwhile, the New York Times features a debate on charter schools – just as it seemed they were taking over, former proponents are calling them into question. It seems now charters are leaving the public school systems in several urban areas with the worst students and little state or community resources…
With a renewed focus and investment into primary and secondary schools and a bubbling financial crisis in higher education (now with fully fledged protests!), the time is right for a public re-examination of education’s core principles. What do we owe, as a nation, to our kids? Why? And most important, who should pay for it?
-Colin
Where are the Liberals?
The Atlantic is featuring three theories on why liberals haven’t been more effective under the Obama Administration, particularly given Democrats’ control of all three branches.
First up is Kevin Baker of Harper’s, who argues that liberals simply have no backbone, practicing what can only be called “learned helplessness.” Baker believes that while liberalism shows some life among our citizenry, the government / leadership class has all but forgotten its relevance. The “center-right” conventional wisdom has solidified and the mere utterance of “the L word” spells political disaster.
Second is the Center for American Progress’s Matt Yglesias, who claims that liberals fail to negotiate effectively. You can’t get the other side to budge unless they think you’ll walk away (I learned this mattress shopping), and since liberals obviously really want health reform, etc, opponents have no incentive to give any ground. If they want a deal, they should find issues that centrists care deeply about and which liberals are merely willing to along.
And third, blogger Chris Bowers suggests that liberals are too much of an easy win for Obama. He knows they’ll support him as the least-bad option no matter what, so they have no bargaining chips.
My sense is that Bowers and Baker are mostly right. And their points are connected: because liberals know they’re down and out in contemporary American politics, they’ll take whatever the Democrats give them. Why hold out for distant ideals when it could jeopardize the little gains they’ve made through a moderate Democratic majority?
‘Tis better to receive than to support
Time and time again, vociferous opponents of state-run health care end up ironically voicing support for the very policies they oppose. Saturday, Sarah Palin told a Canadian crowd in Calgary that her family “used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn’t that ironic.” Well, yes, it is.
And Sue Lowden, running against Harry Reid this year in Nevada, is running ads saying both that Reid’s plan would “weaken Medicare” and that “government-run health care is wrong.”
All politics / partisanship aside, what gives? Seems to me the psychological phenomenon at play here stems from cognitive dissonance theory: events or arguments that clearly disconfirm or contradict our strongly-held beliefs are unlikely to change those beliefs. Instead, we end up awkwardly ignoring these blatant contradictions or treating the dissonant factors as separate; Medicare, in our minds, is an established American tradition but a public option would be socialist, even tyrannical paternalism.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the mark of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time while retaining the ability to function… What, then, do we make of those who would gladly receive government benefits while calling for their elimination?
-Colin
Hate speech and the Constitution
If he contributes nothing else to society, the infamous Fred Phelps has at least forced us to further examine the notion of free speech. At what point does offensive expression become punishable under the law?
Phelps is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, which has gained notoriety over the past decade as a result of its practice of protesting military funerals with signs that read “Thank God for IEDs,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and of course “God Hates Fags.” The group believes that our losses in the War on Terror (along with the suffering from Hurricane Katrina and from the economic recession) are part of God’s punishment for our tolerating homosexuality.
The Supreme Court will now hear Snyder v. Phelps, in which the family of a deceased Marine has sued for damages after Phelps et al showed up en force at their son’s funeral. Most Americans would universally and absolutely condemn the church’s actions. But should they be illegal? If the Court sides against Phelps, would that not open the door to further litigation and regulation of “unsavory” speech?
Truly, one of the law’s most difficult conundrums.
-Colin
Share us