Statelessness sucks
George Soros writes at Project Syndicate that the recent expulsion of the Roma from France is tantamount to collective punishment. His outrage is echoed by a French priest who prays for Sarkozy to have a heart attack.
Although every state obviously has a right to protect public order, critics of the expulsion wonder “what harm can a few hundred people do?”
They wonder too how it’s acceptable for an EU country to forcibly relocate EU citizens without due process, especially when all EU citizens are entitled to freedom of movement.
The Roma are the continent’s largest ethnic minority group. They are not native to Europe and are in fact descended from Indians. Their distinct ethnic identity combined with misperceptions has historically made them outcasts everywhere. The Roma presently being deported from France tried to escape dire poverty and discrimination in Romania.
Despite being EU citizens, the French government’s recent treatment of them signals that no state may reliably look out for them.
How should we respond to the problem of stateless people? For Theodor Herzl and the Zionists, the answer was obvious – to reclaim an ancestral homeland and establish a new nation. But the present Arab-Israeli conflict highlights the extraordinary difficulty and moral complexity of such a solution. And no reasonable person could suggest that the Roma try to re-conquer Punjab in northern India.
The solution will have to be the least impossible of impossible alternatives. The European countries should probably make a concerted effort to integrate the Roma and make them full members of their societies.
Not only does the “plight of so many millions of Roma… [make] a mockery of European values” as Soros writes, but the alternative is to allow a moral and social problem of enormous proportions to fester and ultimately truly undermine public order.
-Charles
Image by Flickr user Rivard used under a Creative Commons Attributions License
Americans are stupid
You may not know this, but, earlier this year, President Obama signed into law the most sweeping overhaul of health care since the 1965 creation of Medicare. It’s the largest piece of social legislation in at least half a century.
I know, I know, I shouldn’t be treating you as if you have your head buried in the sand. Except you do.
According to a recently leaked presentation based on polling and focus groups about the law encourages Democrats to “Let voters know the healthcare [sic] law passed!”
They don’t know? Really?
This raises a depressing question: what’s the point of governing in the Republic of Ignorance?
Most major theories of government make some basic assumptions about human rationality. Some say people are perfectly rational beings capable of deciding their own good. Others take a more moderate stance, suggesting that people are often shaped by their environment and circumstances.
But few if any theories account for complete and total inability to notice life-changing events.
My tone may be humorous, but my humors are melancholy (the bodily ones, anyway).
It’s time to make a choice. Must we radically improve the capacity of our population to understand the basic knowledge it takes to function as a democracy? Or should we radically rethink democracy itself?
In either case, it may be time to do something radical.
-Sam
Image of a lemming used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user kgleditsch.
Democratic ADD
According to James Jay Carafano in today’s New York Post, the press has moved on from the Deepwater Horizon spill—at least, they don’t care about the disaster nearly as much as the locals in the Gulf do.
Carafano’s main project is to criticize the federal response to the spill, on behalf of Americans in the Gulf. But he also notes that people who aren’t still personally affected by the disaster are forgetting about the situation in the Gulf States, or that most people and our news media have a memory problem.
The idea that the citizenry gets apathetic unfortunately quickly with certain issues, like distant disasters and politicians’ records, is not new. It is, nevertheless, important.
Our society is a democratic one. It is the citizens who determine (however indirectly) what decisions are made and what issues need to be decided. If we can only keep our attention focused on each society-spanning problem until another problem arises, how will we resolve them?
Is this democratic ADD one of the reasons we are not a direct democracy, but a representative democracy or republic instead?
TPP’s own Sam Gill has written on a similar topic in a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed. Give it a read.
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user Deepwater Horizon Response.
Primaries as partisan purifiers
A problem?
Last week’s round of upsets in Senate primary races was interpreted by many as the product of an anti-incumbent and -establishment mood. Maybe more than that, however, it was the standard result of primary voters rewarding those especially to the right or left. In the Kentucky Republican race, Rand Paul defeated Trey Grayson. In the Pennsylvania Democrat race, Joe Sestak defeated incumbent Arlen Specter. And incumbent Blanche Lincoln is in a runoff with Bill Halter for the Arkansas Democratic ticket. In all three cases, primary voters have punished the more “moderate” candidate.
Are these primary votes a good thing? Not every democracy has them.
Democracy seems to be in their favor, though. Rather than party insiders somewhat shadily selecting candidates and placing them in seats strategically, the members of the party themselves decide who shall represent their views.
Parties have an entrenched and often positive role in our system, as the sort of ideological categorical guides I discussed earlier, as a means of cooperation and organization, and as an additional systemic check (on each other). Related, they have an enormous amount of power. To leave the selection and placement of party candidates to a few unelected party leaders affords those people an undue amount of democratically unaccountable influence. And independent candidates, who have an difficult time fighting party machines, cannot be counted upon to check party leaders.
Also, primaries might afford the people an opportunity to escape the traditional, status quo views of party leaders (see Rand Paul).
Guest post: Majority rules?
Opinion polls and democratic decision making
Anyone watching the recent health care vote on C-SPAN heard the same refrain from the Republican opposition: the healthcare bill (now law) is morally wrong because a majority of Americans oppose it. Many conservatives made this argument during the year-long slog, citing public opinion polls for support. Indeed, across the political spectrum public opinion polls are regularly used as a defense for or against particular legislation or government actions. But what do opinions polls really tell us? And what role should they have in deciding how we as a political society should act?
The impulse to invoke public opinion as a moral basis for democratic actions is understandable. Citizens in democracies are self-ruling. Acting contrary to the majority opinion is often seen as violating the public will. And opinion polls are as close as we can get in the short term at least, to taking the temperature of the public. Elections are held periodically, but they can only stop perceived injustices after the fact. For instance, assume Congress passes a wildly unpopular bill. It may take upwards of two years before the electorate can voice its disapproval through elections. But after two years, the damage may already be done. It is difficult to retroactively repair injustices. Opinion polls are all we have to assess the public will on a bill by bill basis.
But do opinion polls actually tell us the public will?
Out with the old in with the new
Are term limits a good idea?
Should there be limits on how long politician’s can remain in office? The majority of states now impose term limits on their governors and many people would like to see similar limits placed on officials elected for federal office. Public support for these sorts of laws has always been high and 23 states had passed laws imposing term limits on their U.S. Congressional representatives before the Supreme Court declared these restrictions unconstitutional in 1995. Now, the Tea Party, “with its roots in anti-Washington sentiment,” has become the newest advocates for term limits and has helped reignite the debate over this contentious issue. Both supporters and critics of term limits cite the importance of representative and effective government but they are divided over whether term limits would help us achieve these goals. Read more
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.”
Obama the dictator?
The use and abuse of executive power
On Friday The New York Times reported that the Obama Administration, faced with an uncooperative Congress, is looking into “a list of presidential executive orders and directives” to push its governing agenda forward. The article was, unsurprisingly, met with a barrage of criticism from the right. RedState writers suggested Obama was “dusting off his best Hugo Chavez imitation” and that his Administration had become a “DICTATORSHIP BY FIAT” (emphasis in original).
As The New York Times article notes, presidents can legally make policy without Congressional legislation “through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat.” But just because a president can doesn’t mean a president should. So should Obama use his executive powers, like executive orders and directives?
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
Tyranny of the filibuster?
The New Republic carried an article last month arguing that there exists a realistic way to get the Senate to abolish the filibuster. Taking a page from John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” principal, which states that people should choose just moral rules as if they have no knowledge of how they would be effected by the chosen rules, author Nicholas Stephanopoulos argues that the Senate should pass a law today to ban the filibuster in the future. Since there is no way to know which party would be in the majority in, say, seven years, senators would not know how the rule would affect themselves or their party (satisfying the Rawlsian test). And political self-interest could stop being an excuse for keeping the filibuster in place, as the current majority may very well be the minority in 2017 (satisfying the political feasibility test).
As Stephanopoulos writes:
A debate now on whether to eliminate the filibuster in the future would transform senators’ decision-making calculus. The key questions would no longer be whether they enjoy the personal clout conferred by the filibuster, or whether it advances or threatens their parties’ agendas. The issues, instead, would be whether it makes sense for almost all Senate business to require a supermajority.
Implicit in Stephanopoulos’ argument is that it does not in fact make sense for Senate votes to require a 60-person majority. But why not? Read more
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