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?
Must we call genocide “genocide”?
The Armenian genocide? Or The Armenian mass killings? And does it matter?
In a debate that seems to recur every few years, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted today to condemn as “genocide”, the mass killing of Armenians during and after World War I. Like in 2007, the last time an Armenian Genocide resolution came up, the Administration (then Bush, today Obama), sought to halt the vote - both times to no avail.
Unlike with the situation in Darfur, the hesitancy to use the word “genocide” stems not from worries about the responsibilities to which the use of the word would commit the United States, but from simple geopolitics. Turkey, while acknowledging that as many as 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks, has always denied that the deaths were part of a planned orchestrated campaign - a prerequisite for calling them “genocide.” And fearing the genocide label would tar their national reputation, Turkey has long fought the official declaration by other governments of the events as such. Because of this lobbying, only twenty countries, to date, have recognized the Armenian genocide. Read more
Wrangling over ethics
What should come of Charles Rangel?
Charles Rangel, senior Member of the House of Representatives from New York and chair of the Ways and Means Committee (which writes tax laws), has agreed to relinquish his committee gavel after a months-long imbroglio involving allegations of privately-funded jaunts and failure to report income derived from real estate holdings.
What may seem less odd to congressional pundits and more odd to an ethicist is why so many are calling for him to give up his chairmanship as opposed to resigning from Congress altogether. Is there a method to the madness, or is everything political posturing? Read more
When should politicians resign?
As the New York Times breaks news of more questionable behavior by New York Governor David Paterson, the question on everyone’s minds is will he resign. As of now he maintains that he will not. But the more relevant question for the public philosopher is not will he resign, but should he resign. What do you think? Under what conditions should politicians resign? When they break the law? When they lose the confidence of the voters? When they lose the ability to govern effectively? When they lie?
-Marc
What does corruption require?
The consensus among those in Washington seems to be “quite a bit.” In their much talked about decision in Citizens United, the conservative Supreme Court majority held that money spent independently of campaigns toward political advertising is not corrupting, regardless of amount. (Interestingly, Anthony Kennedy ruled the opposite way in another opinion he wrote, in Caperton v. Massey Coal. That case applied to money spent in judicial elections, however).
Last week, the House ethics committee cleared 7 members accused of contributor kickbacks:
Simply because a member sponsors an earmark for an entity that also happens to be a campaign contributor does not, on these two facts alone, support a claim that a member’s actions are being influenced by campaign contributions.
It’s not surprising that a panel of politicians found this permissible, as the practice of rewarding campaign contributors is quite common to all in Congress. This is like having a hedge fund regulate itself. But it’s frustrating for this reason: One would have to be incredibly naive to believe that there isn’t some sort of relationship between bankrolling a campaign and getting benefits in return (what other reason to corporate PACs and trade associations have for throwing large sums at elected officials?), but it’s also difficult, given the kind of standard we’re setting, to prove corruption in these cases.
In other words, we all know this is “pay to play,” but we simply can’t prove it to anyone’s satisfaction unless we have Blagojevich-like phone calls of the members promising rewards. On the other hand, should we automatically disqualify campaign donors from receiving federal contracts? If not, I suppose the House panel couldn’t have ruled any other way.
- Colin
Democracy, what is it good for?
American politicians and their love-hate relationship with democracy
Americans love democracy, right? In many ways it is our democracy that defines us as a nation, born as we were out of a revolution over “taxation without representation”. I mean, we export this stuff to other countries for heaven’s sake.
And yet with his domestic agenda stalled and his super-majority in the Senate eliminated by the voters of Massachusetts, President Obama has turned to arguably less democratic tools to push his policy proposals. And liberals as a whole, The Weekly Standard claims, “have assigned responsibility for the mess they’re in…to larger, structural faults in American politics and society. Beginning with you.”
The turn against democracy should come as no surprise. Every President faces falling approval ratings. Every Congress sees its electoral stars fading. And almost every time, the instinctive response is to scorn public opinion and “stand on principle.” In some peculiar way, we even encourage our politicians to ignore us. A January Allstate/National Journal poll found that 83% of Americans would trust politicians more if they made a “stronger effort to stand up for principle.”
Sarah Palin, elitist
At TNR.com Leon Wieseltier has an interesting piece on the meaning of elitism and populism. He writes:
The wisdom of a policy is not determined by its social origins. There is a distinction between populism and “the people,” though most populists do not want you to know it. The populism that bases its criticisms on a preference for one segment of the populace is merely another special interest, its denunciations of special interests notwithstanding. This does not mean that its criticisms are wrong; but when they are right, it is because their reasons are moral, not sociological.
-Jake
Landlines, cell phones, and polls
Why my opinion has never mattered…
Here’s something nobody ever talks about, but nevertheless seems like it should be very important: Public opinion polls are almost all done by calling landlines. Do you own a landline? I don’t. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name a friend in my generation who has one.
The demographic implications are pretty obvious - landline polls are likely to skew heavily toward older populations. Comparative studies show that landlines also favor females and whites. (So just replace the word “Americans” in poll results with “Elderly white women” and you’ll get a better picture)
This is a tough issue to get around, and understandably, polling companies have been quick to downplay its significance. Pew says that mobile-only and landline-only polls produce “virtually identical” results. But the same study they used to draw that conclusion provided the numbers that demonstrated the demographic gap described above. Mobile- and landline-based populations will likely converge on some issues, but certainly not all. Politically, it would seem to follow that polls err to the right.
In my view, the increasing scarcity of landlines poses a major obstacle to an already unreliable service; pollsters already have to worry about people without any phones, people who don’t answer phones, and people who aren’t sincere or who don’t understand the questions. Now, with some estimates suggesting that half of adults 30 years old and younger use only cell phones, we can be fairly certain that our voices just aren’t being represented.
It’s unlikely that polls will go away, however. I can’t imagine what the media and anyone with an agenda would do without them (and their infinite, and rather convenient, layers of interpretation).
On the bright side, polls are no more misleading than other mainstay methods of generalizing the “general will” (hat tip to Rousseau), such as, say, voting. The voting demographic is as small and unrepresentative as any, yet we don’t exactly stop political commentators mid-sentence and protest, “Well, technically, New Yorkers didn’t elect Senator Schumer, a relatively small number of voters in New York elected him.”
In other words, whether we’re talking about polls, elections, workers, readers, or viewers, we’re likely to be generalizing the views of a smaller subset onto a much larger population. We’re often reminded after references to the beloved “town hall” government of our Forefathers that civic participation was actually quite limited. Things may not have changed as much as we might like.
UPDATE - I’ve received some rebukes and note here that Gallup, for its part, claims that it’s known about this for years and is continually fixing the issue and including cell phones in their polls. This may be true, but if it wasn’t still a problem, they wouldn’t be calling for so much research on the topic. Someone call me and poll me so I can get over my skepticism.
-Colin
The morality of bipartisanship
Pragmatism, Legitimacy, and Fraternity
Pres. Obama promised and thus far has failed to bring bipartisanship to Washington, D.C. Today he renewed the effort by attending a gathering of House Republicans.
Few, if any leaders contest bipartisanship’s value. It is one of those “golden” concepts of American politics, which Sam–our resident political consultant–can maybe tell us more about. What values, though, does it embody or further?
1. Pragmatism
To the extent that a proposed bill has value, it’s passage is a good thing. If one party does not have sufficient votes to enact a valuable bill without the other’s support, bipartisanship enables the bill’s passage. In this case, the value of bipartisanship is extrinsic or consequentialist, depending on the value of the law it enables, rather than inherent to the concept itself. It prevents legislative gridlock. One concern is that it requires watering down legislation to ensure it passes. But passing a decent law is better than not passing a supposedly perfect law. Bipartisanship gets the job done.
2. Legitimacy
The power of “independents”
In American politics, our partisan divides are rivaled only by our insistence on a mythological, common “American-ness,” constituted by appeals to the Founders/Framers (capital “F” mandatory), to freedom/liberty, and to our rugged, independent nature. Even though the vast majority of Americans identify with one of the two major political parties, most of us like to think of ourselves as “independent,” as it gives us an air of objectivity, astute skepticism, and non-ideological rationality.
But as political scientist John Sides angrily reminds the propagators of the “Great American Independent” myth (Fareed Zakaria and Matt Bai in this case), it just isn’t the case that independents are the driving force in American politics. Most studies show that most so-called independents aren’t actually independent, and those who are account for less than 10% of the electorate.
The interesting philosophical questions here surround (1) the attractiveness of the “independent” label to American voters themselves, and (2) the attractiveness of the “independent” meme in the coverage of politics by the media. Not surprisingly, both trends reinforce the other; popular commentators aren’t just reacting to citizens’ professed ideologies - they’re helping to form them by continually playing up the refreshing, non-biased role of the reasonable moderate.
-Colin
-
Follow us on Twitter
