What I've Learned So Far

I’ve had the quote below sitting around for a while now — you’ll note that the Salon item it’s from is dated May 2008 — because I didn’t quite know what to do with it.

So, what I’m going to do is (a) share it with you, (b) ask you to think generally about how it relates to your political views and the ways that you form them, and (c) await any comments you’d care to make.

Here’s the quote:

“Peak oil and climate change are fronts in the culture wars . . . Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Sensible people could agree that well-regulated markets incorporating the appropriate prices for environmental pollution and energy consumption will provide powerful incentives to allow humanity to avoid devastating energy shocks and the complete despoliation of the planet. We don’t have to consign ourselves to totalitarian dichotomies in which vegan organic gardeners stand on one side, threatening to employ the power of the state to deny everyone else their right to eat bloody porterhouse steaks; while across the trenches stand ranks of right-to-keep-and-bear-arms, give-me-my-SUV-and-suburban-gated-community-or-give-me-death Ayn-Rand disciples, draped in the furs of newly extinct mammal species, for whom a lifetime in hell would be infinitely preferable to a government-mandated solar power water heater.”

Amen.

American politics these days is typically framed in terms far more oppositional than we need if we ever want to come to constructive solutions to our problems.

Are you falling victim to these false dichotomies? Are you engaged in a culture war that you didn’t realize you were signing on for? Do you wear the political suit of clothes that someone else picked out for you, such that if you support Policy A you must support Policy B and oppose Policies C and D?

If so, I ask you to review your beliefs. Test them. Don’t be anyone’s chump, which in my experience is far more likely when you’re moving in lockstep with anything.

Think for yourself.~

(Photo of the crowd at Burning Man by Neil Girling, a.k.a. mr. nightshade, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.)

I nominate Dwight Eisenhower.

This came up yesterday in a conversation at work that spilled over onto Twitter. One big epistemological question that underlies the main question is obvious: What do we mean by “best”?

E.g., some people might look back and say that the answer to the question is LBJ, citing his work to enshrine universal civil rights into U.S. law. Others might say, though, that Johnson’s handling of Vietnam disqualifies him from vying for the title of “best.” Similar arguments could be made against Nixon (Vietnam and Watergate), Reagan (ginormous budget deficits), and so on.

Anyway, feel free to answer these two questions in the comments:

• Who’s the best U.S. president since World War II?
• What do you mean by “best”?

Expect a follow-up post or two in this vein . . .

~

Related posts:

• 10 May 2008: You want some history geekery?
• 2 November 2006: Waiting for Obama?

~

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy; where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

I’m thinking about this after reading my friend John Spong’s excellent Texas Monthly cover feature on Ted Nugent. (Access available only to T.M. subscribers — sorry.) Nugent, you may know, is a huge gun rights advocate, and the article talks about the debates he gets into with gun control activists.

Anyway, gun control is not the type of issue I’m looking for here, because it’s too contentious. The same goes for abortion and immigration. What I’m looking for are issues that we all could come together on, but haven’t yet for whatever reason.

A possible example: capital punishment.

Obviously, the death penalty is pretty contentious, too, but I think that’s partly because of the way it’s argued. Here’s an incomplete sketch of some of the unconvincing arguments:

• Some opponents of the death penalty have tried to cast it as cruel and unusual punishment, even though (a) modern methods aren’t cruel — or at least aren’t that cruel, and (b) the Constitution specifically mentions “capital” crimes, so the concept of the death penalty is hardly unusual.
• Opponents of the death penalty have often said that the death penalty ought to be beneath us as an advanced society. This contention is often paired with the observation that the U.S. is one of the very few rich countries in the world that carries out executions, yet our crime rate isn’t better than many countries that have gone decades and decades without the death penalty. But these arguments are pretty hollow to the opposition, who simply don’t agree that the death penalty is debased, and don’t care that the U.S. is an outlier in this area.
• Meanwhile, advocates for the death penalty talk about it as a deterrent, even though that utility is dubious at best. (We execute a lot of criminals compared to many other countries, but it doesn’t carve down the rate of murders.)
• Advocates for the death penalty sometimes talk about it as giving closure to the families of victims. I support victims of crime wholeheartedly, but there may be other, better ways of gaining closure that don’t involve retributive justice, and that don’t prize the wishes of victims and their famiilies above the greater good of the society as a whole.

I’m well aware that these items, by themselves, are wide open to contention, but that’s what I’m getting at: this is where the the argument often stalls out, precisely because these points are so wide open to contention.

So here’s the much simpler line of argument I would focus on instead to advocate the abandonment of the death penalty:

1. It’s super-expensive. Death rows are notoriously expensive, as taxpayers end up spending tons of money on rounds of appeals. No death sentences = less arguing in the courts and less expense to society.
2. We occasionally execute the wrong people. It may be rare, but it’s certainly true that our criminal justice system has executed innocent men in the past. Whatever benefits may accrue to death sentences, it’s not worth the risk of executing the wrong person, surely?

Note that this argument doesn’t require people to agree on the moral standing of capital punishment. It doesn’t require comparisons to other countries. It doesn’t even require us to have a debate about the possible deterrent effects of capital punishment. It simply points out that we’re spending tons and tons of money on society’s worst members, and even after all that we sometimes execute innocent people, which just stinks. Why not switch to life-without-parole instead, save the money, and not have to waste time arguing about it anymore?

I don’t expect this to convince activists on one side or the other of this particular issue. (So if you are one, please spare me your ire in the comments.) But it might convince a broad range of people across the political spectrum.

What do you think? And what other issues might be framed this way?

~

(Picture by Thomas Hawk, used under a Creative Commons Noncommercial license.)

One of the grand problems of political discourse in the United States is that we are often expected to put on an entire suit of clothes at once — to buy into an entire ideology, with all its interlocking parts. This leads to false dichotomies, shoddy thinking, and the erosion of our Republic. I hope you’ll reject that way of thinking.

I have a friend who frames this in terms of the death penalty. He’s a political freethinker, but he’s found that if he learns a person’s stance on capital punishment, he can often extrapolate many of their other political views. In many cases, the first “suit of clothes” looks like this:

• pro-capital punishment
• pro-gun rights
• pro-life
• pro-Iraq invasion
• pro-Bush
• anti-Obama
• anti-tax
• anti-regulation
• “conservative”
• etc.

The other suit of clothes is the negative image of the first:

• anti-capital punishment
• pro-gun control
• pro-choice
• anti-Iraq invasion
• anti-Bush
• pro-Obama
• pro-tax (or tolerant of higher taxes, especially on the rich)
• pro-regulation
• “liberal”
• etc.

Here’s the big problem: if you wear one of these suits of clothes without thinking it through, you end up holding ridiculous positions. For now, just one example:

• Most climatologists in the world, regardless of nationality or politics, are convinced on the basis of strong evidence that global warming is a real, current problem that requires strong human intervention. If they’re right — or even likely right — how will it benefit us to resist them on ideological grounds?

We have big problems ahead of us: climate, economy, foreign policy, et cetera. And too many of our approaches to these problems have been driven by ideology, not independent thought.

Please buck that trend.

~

(Photo by John Keogh, used under a CC-NC license.)

The great investor Warren Buffett loves to play bridge. Since he’s an avid fan of the game — and, no doubt, since he’s Warren Buffett — he’s gotten to play with some of the luminaries of the bridge world. He has talked about how the very best bridge players virtually never make a mistake: they may lose a hand because of the cards they are dealt, but they don’t lose by making bad plays trick by trick.

With hopes of setting aside all partisan differences, I would note that the United States has undergone a period of intensely ideology-driven foreign policy during this decade. As it happens, the ideology in question has been (more or less) neo-conservative, and it has centered on Iraq and the “War on Terror.” In earlier generations, ideologically driven foreign policy has sometimes come from the Democrats rather than the Republicans (for example in the cases of Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter), and it has centered on other themes and other areas of the world.

There’s no need for a long essay belaboring this point, but what the United States needs in foreign policy, probably for a good twenty years to come, is a notable lack of ideology. Sure, we’ll always stump for democracy and free markets in general, and well we should. We ought to speak up likewise in favor of human rights. But we can’t afford — not even us, not even with our great resources — to fight ideological wars abroad, or cultural wars at home, if we are to retain our influence on the world, or if we are to regain the international standing that we have lost in recent years.

Saber-rattling won’t get us where we need to go. Wilfully simplistic misreadings of the world’s politics, ditto. In some cases, we may have to hold our noses as we make the smart play.

But for a couple of decades at least, we need a bipartisan commitment to making the smart play — like a master bridge player, like Warren Buffett choosing his investments — rather than the play that makes us feel vindicated in the moment, or that scratches an ideological itch.

~

An idea for your consideration: During the 19th century, the commanding issue of financial politics in the United States was the interrelation of the money supply with a national bank. Andrew Jackson, for one, hated the idea of a national bank.

It’s hard for us to understand today how seriously this issue was taken, how deeply it divided American politicians, and how long it lasted. Party platforms were built around this, and whole sessions of Congress debated it at length and with great bitterness.

The issue lasted for three-quarters of a century, such that seventy years after Jackson rose to the White House, William Jennings Bryan could campaign on the still-controversial issue of a bimetallic currency.

And then came the creation of the Federal Reserve. At which point the issue dried up altogether. Poof.

Not everything works that way. The other great question of the 19th century in U.S. politics — slavery — was even larger, and it was only solved via the bloodiest conflict this hemisphere has ever seen. So I don’t want to suggest that every political issue has such a straightforward solution.

But it’s worth considering: what’s the piece of policy that would erase Issue X, Issue Y, or Issue Z as a bone of contention within U.S. politics? Or within international affairs?

Please, ladle your thoughts upon me in the comment thread.

~

(Images of Jackson and Bryan via Wikipedia.)

I got yer history geekery right here. For reasons that aren’t clear even to me, I’ve cooked up a chart that tracks the prior government service of every President of the United States. You can have this ultra-spiffy Word document VERSION TWO 2.1 2.2* of this document for the ages for your very own by the simple expedient of . . .

. . . clicking this link.

Key:

• Cmbt. = Military combat experience. Note that for a number of presidents, e.g. Lyndon Johnson, I’m not sure whether their military service involved combat or not, ergo I used parentheses. I excluded a number of military veterans who did not see combat during their military service, e.g. Abraham Lincoln. (This category added for version 2.0.)
• Law = Practice as a lawyer, or admission to the bar. Note that Theodore Roosevelt’s entry has parentheses because, while he studied law seriously, he never practiced it, nor was he admitted to any state’s bar, so far as I know. (This category added for version 2.0.)
• Lege. = Service in a colonial or state legislature.
• Cong. = Service in the Continental Congress or U.S. House of Representatives.
• Sen. = Service in the U.S. Senate.
• Gov. = Service as a state governor. Note that William Henry Harrison and William Howard Taft are shown with parentheses because they served as governors of territories or possessions rather than states of the Union.
• Judge = Service as a judge at any level.
• Cab. = Service in the cabinet of another President.
• VP = Service as Vice President of the United States.

No doubt I’ve overlooked or miscoded something along the way, so corrections or additions will be gratefully received.

Correction, Sunday morning, 10 a.m.: William Howard Taft, as everybody knows, never served as Vice President. He was elected President just after serving as Secretary of War. So I fixed this for version 2.1 of the document.

*Corrections, 6 July 2008: Per the comments of “bayesian” below, I amended the combat experience of Pierce, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Ford.

So numerous indeed and so powerful are the causes which serve to give a false bias to the judgment, that we, upon many occasions, see wise and good men on the wrong as well as on the right side of questions of the first magnitude to society.

This circumstance, if duly attended to, would furnish a lesson of moderation to those who are ever so much persuaded of their being in the right in any controversy. . . . [N]othing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

—Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 1

I don’t read much from Fox News, but my ears perk up when Fox takes a clear hard line against the Administration:

Bush Administration Credibility Suffers After Iran NIE Report

Thursday, December 06, 2007
By Greg Simmons

WASHINGTON — The new National Intelligence Estimate — which says Iran had a nuclear weapons development program, but halted it in 2003 — made President Bush’s week play out like a sad country song.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was smiling and called the report a victory. Rush Limbaugh blasted the report as a product of administration sabotage. And Democrats were accusing the president of being a flip-flopper.

The NIE drew fire from nearly all sides, including anti-war Democrats in Congress, foreign leaders the administration needs to hold the line against Iran, and conservatives usually supportive of the administration.

The root issue for many critics comes down to credibility: Credibility of the estimate, credibility of the intelligence community that developed it and the credibility of the administration for whom those agencies work. Bridging that credibility gap might prove difficult for an administration heading into its final months.

My impression has always been that the Administration makes a practice of manipulating intelligence findings for its own political ends. They certainly aren’t the first to do so, and they won’t be the last. But they’ve done it pretty egregiously, and they’ve done it far too often. Whatever you think of their policies as a whole, this aspect of the Administration’s politicking goes too far.