Potpourri

The Year Turns

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Weird Al and Me

Lion of the Day

Brief Hiatus

Posting will be light-to-nonexistent for the rest of today - not that you'll notice the difference, given how light posting has been all week - while the Atlantic's technological whizzes transition this blog to a newer, better Movable Type platform. (Comments posted during the transition may vanish into the ether.) So have a great weekend, and I'll be back to my usual pace, such as it is, on Monday.

Comments

Just a quick announcement: From now on, one of the Atlantic's crack interns will be going through the comment threads at the end of every business day, deleting any comments that run afoul of our comments section's terms of service, which state that "By using this service you agree not to post material that is obscene, harassing, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable." I've instructed him to err on the side of deletion if he's uncertain about whether a comment crosses the line; I apologize if this has a chilling effect on freewheeling argument, and I especially apologize for not having time time to police the comments (and participate in the discussion more often) myself. If you feel that your thoughts have been unjustly deleted, feel free to send me an email, but in general I hope that this will encourage a greater degree of civility. We'll see how it goes.

Swimming With Buckley

Perhaps you're WFB'd out, but if not the Atlantic has posted my own Buckley reminiscence, which is excerpted from Privilege.

And if you've never heard the story of how the Buckley Review and the National Buckley helped get David Brooks his first job, go read his column today.

The Current

You may have noticed that our homepage here at the Atlantic is now headlined by something called "The Current." The idea behind the feature is to provide quick and useful takes on the obvious and not-so-obvious news of the day, with items that simultaneously offer brief commentary from a member of the Atlantic family (I'll be writing a couple a week, as will some of my fellow bloggers, and our OnDeadTree staff will be contributing frequently as well) and a round-up of some the best opinion on and around whatever the subject of the item happens to be. It's a work in progress - as you can probably guess from the "beta" tag adorning it - and it will doubtless evolve over time, but don't let that stop you from checking it out: At the moment, the headliners are my mini-obit for Buckley and James Gibney, our deputy managing editor extraordinaire, on U.S.-India relations.

Recommended Reading

I hope to back to blogging speed soon; in the meantime, you might enjoy:

Jim Manzi on poverty, upward mobility, and the anti-Barbara Ehrenreich. (For a fascinating take on these issues, you might try Katherine Newman's Chutes and Ladders; here's Paul Tough's NYTimes review.)

The Economist and Daniel Larison on the Putinista appropriation of Byzantine history.

David Frum - whose "Bookshelf" feature is one of the ornaments of the blogosphere - on George Eliot.

Nick Denton versus Vulture on whether we need a Wire movie.

Reihan on Larry Lessig, pro and (very respectfully) con.

Brad DeLong on Fidelophilia after Fidel, and my colleague, Graeme Wood - with text here, image here - on Havana after Communism.

And five years old but still amazing - Gene Simmons does NPR. (hat tip: James Poulos)

Declare Yourself

Five declarations of love, from Matt Zoller Seitz - including this classic, of course:

Censorship

As regular readers have no doubt noticed, I don't usually have time to participate in the discussions in the comments threads. I have even less time, unfortunately, to police them for profanity, ad hominems, etc. However, starting with the last post, I'm going to make a half-hearted attempt: I've done a little deleting and banning, and I'll attempt to respond semi-expeditiously to people who can't manage to write a post without deploying terms like "asshole" and "douchebag" and "Repiglican."

And yes, I'm mainly talking about one commenter here.

Bobby Fischer, RIP

I was never any good at chess, but of all chess manuals I read in my brief, early-adolescence attempt to become a grandmaster, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess was far and away the best. Presumably the royalties went to fund Fischer's Hungarian-Japanese-Icelandic exile (with stints on Filipino radio thrown in for good measure), where he can't have grown any more comfortable, or less insane, since Rene Chun's fine profile, "Bobby Fischer's Pathetic Endgame," ran in the December 2002 Atlantic.

Friday Afternoon Reading

Joe Carter, who was temporarily Huckabee's rapid-response man (and turned out the best mass emails of any campaign's communications shop), on his campaign-trail experiences, and what conservative elites don't get about "Reagan conservatives."

Jim Fallows on the post-caucus stagecraft.

Chris Orr's top ten films of '07 (as well as other year-end awards).

Jack Shafer on Bill Kristol, Times columnist.

Matt Zoller Seitz on There Will Be Blood - but only after you've seen it. And Tim Noah and Armond White, as well. (I'm still sorting through my own thoughts on the film, but you can find them in the next NR.)

Robert Royal on Sarkozy's trip to the Vatican.

Your 2008 Predictions

Safire? He's lost his mojo. Go with Millman instead.

The Auld Country

Alex Massie ponders the unusual sympathy among American conservatives for the cause, past and present, of Scottish independence; Larison weighs in here. Between them, I think they cover most of the reasons for this phenonemon. There's the “Cousins' War” dynamic, which both ethnically and ideologically connected the warring sides in Great Britain's 17th and early 18th century intra-island struggles to the combatants in the American Civil War, and thus created a natural affinity between the American Old Right and the Jacobite cause. There's the broader conservative preference for local self-government and traditional ways of life, which militates against the Protestant-liberal ideological project that unified Great Britain and brought the Highlanders to heel. More broadly still, there's the American tendency to romanticize our revolutionary period and look with disfavor on bossy Englishmen (a tendency that's particularly pronounced among conservatives), which breeds an affinity for anti-English revolts of all sorts.

It's the middle explanation, I think, that best tracks with my own philo-Caledonian sentiments. Despite some Southern roots in the family tree I have a Yankee's distaste for the Confederate cause, and I'm actually fairly partial to bossy Englishmen in many (though not all) historical contexts; my Jacobite sympathies, meanwhile, ultimately have more to do with regret over the eclipse of Catholicism in Great Britain than with Scottish liberties as such. To the extent that I find the Scottish National Party interesting, then, it's out of a combination of boyish Bonny Prince Charlie romanticism, instinctive small-is-beautifulism, and affection for, well, Scotland: I find the country intensely attractive in a variety of ways, and when you find a place attractive you naturally sympathize with people who say it ought to be free as well.

This is about as far as a serious weighting of the costs and benefits of disunion as you can get, and of course the SNP's historic commitment to socialism and the European Union is some distance from E.F. Schumacher and even further from His Most Catholic Majesty Charles Stuart, long may he reign. But then I don't pretend to be an authority on Scottish politics in any real sense; I just strike silly poses and leave the analysis to actual Scotsmen like Massie.

Photo by Flickr user Peter Macdonald used under a Creative Commons license.

Quote For the Day

"Come on baby, you're all mine."

Free Intellectual Stimulation

As a courtesy for readers of this blog, I have ten tickets available to a forthcoming debate, hosted by the Economist, on the resolved: "Religion and politics should always be kept separate." The Economist's Editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, will be moderating, with the Rev. Barry Lynn and Irshad Manji for the affirmative and Fr. Richard Neuhaus and Walter Russell Mead for the negative. It's on November 10th in New York City, at Gotham Hall on 1356 Broadway (at 36th Street); put down your name in the comments section (you can request one seat or two), and if you're quick enough on the draw, your name will be on the list at the door.

Heads A-Blogging

Me and Matt, on Hillary's electability, how to take down Rudy Giuliani, and other pressing issues of the day.

Reihan: The Logic of Tax-Cutting

I've never been a great enthusiast for tax cuts per se. I much prefer tax reforms that make the burden more family-friendly and more growth-friendly. My sense is that we should keep taxes as low as possible for as long as possible consistent with maintaining high-quality public services. This means that "shifting the tax burden from the rich to future generations" is a bad idea. Tax cuts today often mean big tax hikes tomorrow, as Daniel Shaviro convincingly explained a few years back.

But of course the United States has a characteristically "exceptional" approach to taxes. Despite the fact that there was no real clamor for across-the-board tax cuts during the first Bush term (from pressure groups, yes, from the middle-class voters who theoretically decide elections, no), we got them in the spades. The rich were the big beneficiaries, of course, but middle-class voters found that state and local taxes, health care, and housing now far outweight the federal tax burden as a source of anxiety. Naturally, this has increased demand for government. This dynamic will define US politics for the next few years.

New Labour seemed to have "solved" this puzzle by delivering macroeconomic stability and a highly opaque tax code loaded with user fees, a stamp duty, and other "revenue enhancements." New Labour's (attractive) message was that you get what you pay for when it comes to public services, so the public must accept somewhat higher taxes in exchange for more choice and higher quality.

I say "solved" because there is an increasing sense that the British public hasn't been getting what it's paid for. And so the appeal of tax cuts is rising from the dead. This is particularly interesting because until relatively recently, the Conservatives have been terrified of promising tax increases for fear of being painted as extremists who want to gut public services. Even now they are careful to at least pretend to responsibly cost out any tax cuts and to propose revenue replacements. George Osborne's promise to slash the inheritance tax is (it now seems clear) largely responsible for Gordon Brown' retreat from a fall election.

Anatole Kaletsky has a brilliant column on what's going on:

After many years of disappointment about public service standards, voters are deeply sceptical about promises from all politicians, regardless of party, to improve education, clean up hospitals or make the streets safe. This does not mean that voters are indifferent to policies on crime, health and education. They care about public services a lot and would reject any party that looked like doing major damage in these areas. They may not, however, attach much weight to any promised improvements until these are clearly demonstrated in their own lives. Tax cuts, on the other hand, are palpable as soon as they are announced.

Kaletsky has some other more striking observations.

Young voters trying to climb on to the housing ladder were attracted by the cuts in stamp duty. Even more importantly, middle-aged, middle-class women, eager to maximise the legacies that they can leave to their children and grandchildren, will vote for any party promising to relieve them of inheritance tax.

This is despite the fact that:

Inheritance tax is, from an egalitarian standpoint, the fairest and most progressive of all taxes.

As Americans know very well, certainly with regards to the inheritance tax,

such an “immoral” and “regressive” tax policy seems to be exactly what voters – including many marginal Labour and Liberal voters – enthusiastically support. And all over the world – in America, Ireland, Japan and more recently even in France and Sweden – we have seen regressive consumption taxes rising, while “progressive” taxes on wealth and inheritance disappear, providing disproportionate benefits to the wealthiest voters.

What all this means for observers of the American political scene is not immediately clear, but I have some theories. I'm hoping to write more about this in the near future.

Reihan: Larison on the Depressed, Drunken Blue Elephant

Possibly the most entertaining thing you will read all day. After taking a gander at next year's RNC logo, our favorite Byzantinist writes the following:

Is the message of this logo that the Republican Party is drunk (the stars)? Depressed (hence the blue)? Insane? Perhaps the message is that the party’s being chopped to pieces, or gradually erased from existence and disappearing into the background?

Reihan: Bring Back Communes!

We all know that the kibbutzim failed as a social experiment: those that thrive today operate on markedly different principles than those of their utopian forebears. Having learned quite a lot about how and why so-called "intentional communities," I really think we need to take another crack at building an alternative to single-family living arrangements. No, I don't mean we need to build more multi-family apartment buildings or condos, though we should certainly do that. I mean I think we need to encourage families and couples to "double up," i.e., to live in closer quarters with strangers. If this sounds to you like Soviet-style communal apartments, you're on the right track.

Continue reading "Reihan: Bring Back Communes!" »

Reihan: Wham Bam Thank You Cam(eron)

One of my favorite bloggers, Alex Massie, is thrilled with David Cameron's performance during the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool.

The speech may have been short of soaring rhetoric, but that's no bad thing these days. Cameron's task was not to show off with jokes or applause lines of lofty rhetoric but to show that he had bottom. By and large, I think he succeeded.

He even declined to throw too much red meat to the party faithful. Immigration and Europe were raised, but not major themes. He didn't even launch a passionate, indignant assault upon the Labour Party and Gordon Brown. What he did do, however, was come across as a thoughtful young man who had thought long and hard about the problems facing British society. It wasn't enough, he said, for the Tories to point out why Labour has failed to meet its own targets. The Tories had to understand - and persuade the country - why Labour had under-achieved and under-whelmed.

Having just seen the speech, I was thoroughly impressed as well. But it's important to remember that it took ten long years for the Conservatives to get to even this uncertain point, when they will still most likely be defeated in a general election held in the fall. Will it take Republicans a decade to get back in step with the mood of the country? Barring a minor miracle, my guess is that it will take at least that long.

Reihan: Hung!

At the risk of spoiling the results for those of you who missed the Top Chef finale, I'd like to second Matt Yglesias in praising the show and in declaring my support for Hung. But my support for Hung was, though I am loathe to admit it, based in simple ethnic nationalism. In truth, my loyalties were with the brash, abrasive, and diminutive Howie, covered in vivid detail by Grub Street. Once Howie was knocked out, I was adrift. Hung was, let's be frank, kind of an obnoxious blowhard, always shocked by the merest criticism. "You thought I shouldn't have served braised human flesh! Wow, I mean. Wow. That's weird. But okay ..."

Here's the thing: he was the last short man standing, and also (let's put all our cards on the table here) he was a scrappy immigrant. Now, I'm not an immigrant, but I did move from Brooklyn to Washington, D.C. In that disorientation and displacement, I identify with Hung's journey from Vietnam.

One thing I found a little creepy: everyone said he was utterly soulless (*cough*, sounds like an Ivy League admissions office), and so he talked about his "soul" during his "let's emote" session at the end of Part I of the Finale. That struck me as ... soulless. I'd have much preferred a bold statement of, "They say I ain't got no soul. That I'm a robot. WELL-I-AM-ROBOT, MUST-DESTROY-HUMANS!" and then fired a red beam from the middle of his forehead that vaporized Padma Lakshmi.

As for Padma Lakshmi, some say ill-considered plastic surgery has given her a Michael Jackson nose. I say, first, that no one talks about Tom Colichio that way, which suggests a certain level of misogyny. And, second, I think she's quite beautiful. (And South Asian! Woo!)

That's enough for the ethnic and heightist and displacedist nationalism.

Reihan: Why Paul Kagame is Important

Many years ago, Fareed Zakaria began a fascinating with Lee Kuan Yew, one of my personal heroes, with the following:

"ONE OF THE ASYMMETRIES of history," wrote Henry Kissinger of Singapore's patriarch Lee Kuan Yew, "is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries." Kissinger's one time boss, Richard Nixon, was even more flattering. He speculated that, had Lee lived in another time and another place, he might have "attained the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone."

If anything, I think this is an understatement. And I wonder if we'll soon be saying the same thing about Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda. Read this very short op-ed to see what I mean.

I realize that there is a pattern of Westerners fawning over this or that African leader, and the romance usually ends badly. Lest we forget, Robert Mugabe was once celebrated throughout the world. Yet it's precisely the bourgeois banality of Kagame's ambitions that I find so encouraging. He's not tugging at heartstrings, but rather setting achievable ambitions and building the institutional capacity he needs, with considerable help from friendly outsiders, to achieve them.

Reihan: Shifting the Immigration Equation

The great egalitarian objection to mass immigration, and more specifically the low-skill influx, is that it increases wage dispersion. How? There are a lot of ways in which low-skill and high-skill workers are complementary: a low-skill writer like yours truly can delight and entertain high-skill mathematicians, giving them the inner strength they need to finish proving a particularly vexing theorem. But if there are only a handful of low-skill writers, our services will soon become quite dear, and those high-skill mathematicians will be weeping, unproductively, over their keyboards. That's when a boatload of Indian writers suddenly show up, wittier and far faster than me, to drive down the price of my services. Suddenly theorems are being proved left and right! So the mathematicians see their pay packets skyrocket!

But wait: what if we also brought in a ton of Indian mathematicians? That would subject high-skill natives to the same pressures faced by low-skill natives. And it would, to my mind, almost certainly be a good thing. As this very erudite and very mysterious Free Exchange blogger points out, Alan Greenspan agrees. Good for him!

Taking this to the real world for a moment, there is an added advantage: agglomeration economies are a powerful thing, and concentrating the best minds in the world in a particular region almost certainly accelerates the pace of innovation. As for the "brain drain" from the poor world to the rich world, the "brain drain" is increasingly the "brain circulation," with valuable human capital flowing back, sparking new agglomerations and new innovations.

Reihan: Pre-Tax Inequality

Will Wilkinson has a thought-provoking post on pre-tax income inequality in the US and Germany. Most of us are familiar with the fact that after-tax (or rather after taxes and transfers) income inequality is markedly higher in the US than in Germany. But pre-tax, the levels are roughly the same. A few weeks ago, I puzzled over this in a short post.

Keep in mind that Germany absorbed the DDR in 1989. At unification, the population of West Germany was at 63 million. The population of East Germany was 16 million. Massive transfers have failed to close the gap between the neue Lander and the more prosperous south and west, though I imagine intra-national migration has helped somewhat. In 2007, Germany has a population just above 82 million, which implies a population increase of 3 million over 18 years: negligible. At 300 million, the US population has increased by about 52 million since 1990. And of course "immigrants, legal and illegal, account for about 40 percent of population growth." (Let's treat this number as a guideline: it wasn't calculated for the increase between 1990 and 2007! But I imagine the actual result wouldn't be far off.) A large share of immigrants, like my parents and many of my friends, come from the developing world; and many of these immigrants are low-skill, a pattern that often persists into the next generation.

All this is to say that we do pretty well, and the Germans do pretty badly, in terms of inequality of market income. I don't know exactly what this means, but it struck me as worthy of note.

Well, Will has a straightforward interpretation.

But it seems to me to fit pretty well with the weak effect of the relationship between declining unions and rising inequality found in other research, and suggests that the structure of basic American political-economic institutions is not especially conducive to inegalitarian outcomes.

That sounds about right.

There are some on the left who want the US tax-and-transfer regime to be more generous towards the poor and lower-middle-class. And there are others who seek large-scale structural shifts in the US economy, shifts that aim to change the pre-tax balance of economic forces. I actually don't think it's obvious that we should exclusively pursue the first path. The idea of a "property-owning democracy," in which ownership of income-producing assets is spread far more evenly, is about this pre-tax balance. You might say it is about strengthening the relative bargaining position of the working poor. But I do think open labor markets are the wrong target. Far better to use wage subsidies and other tools like it than to adopt, say, centralized wage bargaining.

The Scandinavian settlement, favored by many on the left and which I find pretty attractive as well, is built on (a) broad-based taxes, (b) relatively open labor markets, (c) extremely low trade barriers, and, most importantly and most distinctively, (d) high-quality public services. We mustn't forget that (a) and (d) are closely related. As Peter Lindert has argued, the consumers of (d) tend to pay for (d) thanks to (a).

The implications, to my mind, are that (1) the federal government ought to and almost certainly will have a much larger role in guaranteeing high-quality healthcare for all Americans. After some political wrangling and rear-guard actions by the small-government right, this will become a consensus position: the thorny questions will be over the delivery of services and the extent of redistribution. Hopefully any reform will make the "hidden welfare state" less opaque. And (2) we will, sooner or later, move in the direction of a VAT.

Reihan: My Favorite Actor

First, I'll note that I've never liked the term "actress." We find "doctress" absurd, and with good reason. Acting is a profession, and I don't see why "actor" shouldn't be a gender-neutral term.

With that said, my favorite actor is probably Michelle Monaghan. Turns out she is funny and self-effacing as well as supremely talented.

To my chagrin, she is starring opposite Ben Stiller in The Heartbreak Kid. My sense from the trailers is that Monaghan's character is not crippled by profound self-loathing or deep-seated body image "issues" (e.g., the delusion that one's body is covered by an impenetrable layer of poisonous quills deadly to anyone but Ben Stiller, thus making physical intimacy with the non-Stiller population essentially impossible). So how exactly do you expect me to believe that she'd fall in love with Ben Stiller? The notion that any human being, or coyote or armadillo, could "fall for" Stiller defies credulity.

"But this happened in real life!," you object. And it's true, Stiller does have a wife. Do you have any solid proof that some kind of foul play or black magic was not involved? Perhaps Stiller called upon some sort of mystical runestone or magical flute to effect his nefarious design.

To use a favorite blogospheric turn-of-phrase, I declare the burden of proof to be on those of you who believe Stiller is not a dangerous necromancer who must be banished to the outer reaches of space. Take that!

Reihan: A National Party No More?

Michael Barone is talking up the chances of a longshot Republican, Jim Ogonowski, who is running against Democrat Niki Tsongas in a special election in the Fifth District of Massachusetts. Ogonowski has become a cause of choice among members of the "rightroots," forward-looking Republicans like Patrick Ruffini who (in a neat historical reversal) are drawing on insights from the "netroots" on winning elections and shaping the ideological direction of their party.

Chances are that Ogonowski will lose. But how is it that Ogonowski is even remotely competitive in this deep blue district? Barone has a theory.

Ogonowski is running a 2007 campaign, emphasizing different issues from Republicans in 2004 or 2006. One is taxes. With the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire in 2010, taxes will go up unless Congress acts; Tsongas, like most House Democrats, wants to repeal some but not necessarily all of the cuts. Ogonowski says the average family in the district will pay $4,000 in additional taxes if the cuts are allowed to lapse. This is an affluent district, with a median income of $56,000 in 2000, well above the national average. The tax issue has not done much for Republicans in this decade. But with the tax cuts scheduled to expire, it may be more salient now.

Another sense in which Ogonowski is running a 2007 campaign is his approach to the Iraq war.

He says he was opposed to going to war in Iraq but now wants us to pursue success; he opposes raising the retirement age for Social Security.

This is an important and telling mix of positions, which will be crucially important to any Republican revival outside of the South. And a Republican revival outside of the South is particularly important for all the reasons Christopher Caldwell laid out in a very prescient article published almost ten years ago in The Atlantic and ably summarized here.

Reihan: The Best Resume of All Time?

Here's a candidate: Tom Billings, a man who passed away recently. As you can see from the excerpts below, he had a very full life.

Continue reading "Reihan: The Best Resume of All Time?" »

Reihan: A Conservative Comeback?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But it seems the Cameron Conservatives are not doomed just yet.

The Tories now have a huge opening to ram home to the public what everyone in Westminster knows: Brown is just as keen on spin as Blair. The line of attacks should be, if Brown will play politics with the deployment of British troops overseas is there anything that he won’t do to win?

Add to this, the brewing row over the apparent use of Treasury officials to discredit Tory tax plans and Brown has got himself on to a very sticky wicket at just the wrong time. Cameron will step up to the podium on Wednesday with the Tories in far better shape than anyone would have expected this time last week. If he delivers, the Tories might just find themselves with the big ‘mo behind them.

That, of course, is a big "if." Now, you might be wondering: what's at stake here? Lefties can be forgiven for thinking that a Cameron defeat would be a very good thing. After all, the rap on him is that he is "Chameleon Dave," an essentially Bushian figure who uses sugary language to sell a musty and divisive agenda. Or lefties could see that Cameron represents a marked shift on the right, away from classical Thatcherism in favor of a more modest, meliorist politics that accepts the basics of the Thatcherite settlement and the Blairite settlement. To the extent the Cameron Conservatives want to shrink the size of government, they mean to shrink its relative size by growing the economy and the voluntary sector. You can disagree with this, but lefties would be right to see this as a "taming" of the political right, a phenomenon also seen in Sweden's Reinfeldt government.

Reihan: Swiss-o-philia

Because there was an awful fire in my neighborhood recently, I am feeling even more pro-firefighter than usual. Enjoy.

I sense I'd enjoy this more if I could understand French.

Reihan: Tiny Masters of Today Get Cranky

The coolest kids in America* on homework and teachers:

Hi! So you’re in sixth grade now, right? How do you like it? Well, it’s lot different, because it’s my first year in middle school. I personally think there are too many teachers. Because your teachers don’t care if your other teachers give you too much homework! They just give you more. It’s so inconsiderate! Middle school is kind of fun because it makes you feel older. It’s more like high school. You can do things by yourself.

This is how I feel about life: I'm in the 105th grade now, and I can watch The Twilight Zone at 2 AM and eat lunch wherever I want: rad.

* Or maybe the coolest kids are Smoosh.

Reihan: Has the US Learned How to Defeat an Open-Source Insurgency?

John Robb says no, but with an interesting wrinkle.

After four painful years, the US military has stumbled upon (mostly due to the now classic Jihadi overreach -- as in Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.) the only model for fighting a mature open source insurgency: a decentralized model of security that forgoes centralized defense/police forces in favor of a plethora of independent militias. The success of this model in reducing violence (at least in the short term) in Anbar province, has led to its replication in other provinces.

Yet this new decentralized strategy

runs counter to all of the classic goals of counter-insurgency and more importantly, the stated (and implied) goals for the US in Iraq:

* A viable central government. Every time a militia is stood up, it is at the direct expense of the central government. It loses the essential requirement for any viable state: a monopoly of force.
* A grand political bargain. An open-source counter-insurgency locks Iraq into a patchwork of mini-fuedal principalities with a large diversity of primary loyalties. Political settlement now becomes impossible since the sheer diversity of armed interests will overwhelm any attempt at reconciliation.
* A safe place for private oil companies and a long term US military presence. This new patchwork of armed groups in Iraq ensures chaos, which will make it impossible to attain any level of modern normalcy. Vendettas between militias, betrayal (of US troops), rampant crime/theft/corruption, and more is on the dinner plate for decades to come. Finally, the open source insurgency won't go away. It will only return when it revises its methods in light of the new conditions.

So even the good news is not unambiguously good.

Reihan: Enthusiast Dollars and Opportunist Dollars

Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in Q3 fundraising. Perhaps this is unfair of me, but how many donors or bundlers do you think contribute to the Obama campaign because they are certain he'll win and they want a seat at the table? And now how many donors or bundlers contribute to the Clinton campaign because they think she is a safe bet?

HuffPo a Go Go

Arianna and Lerer keep going from strength to strength.

Good for them! My guess is that they'll soon face some stiff competition.

Reihan: He's a Hypnotist

This story reminded me of this song.

Reihan: PMCs and Imperialism in Iraq

What exactly was the Iraqi government hoping to accomplish by banning Blackwater? A few thoughts:

(1) This was a symbolic gesture for domestic political consumption; the Iraqi public is outraged by a foreign occupation, and passing this legislation is a relative inexpensive way of signaling nationalist resistance: that Blackwater is a small part of the PMC landscape lends credence to this notion, which I think reflects the conventional wisdom.

(2) Because PMCs are such a central part of the US presence, undermining them is a way of undermining said presence -- and this in turn furthers the goal of a Shia leadership that sincerely believes it can successfully vanquish the Sunni minority through sheer ruthlessness.

(3) Chris Hayes sees the Blackwater imbroglio as further proof that "Iraq is an imperial project." And that's clearly true in a sense. Similarly, the US occupation of Germany and Japan and Austria (radically different for all of the obvious reasons) saw to it that any armed resistance was crushed, co-opted, or otherwise contain to maintain suzerainty. Indeed, the imperialist component of American influence was in fact greater during the Cold War according to the very smart Nexon-Wright analysis (which I found via M.Y.).

Clearly we're in a strange and different situation in which the United States is in a very antagonistic relationship with its supposed "client state," the Shia-dominated Iraqi semi-state. Banning Blackwater would undermine the ability of US forces to continue as the dominant military presence in Iraq (see 2), so it's hardly shocking that the Iraqi government would press for such a step. So Chris is right: the US presence has to be justified by something more than, "Hey man, we're just here to support a fledgling democracy." But of course the rationale for the US presence has long since moved past that point to, "We need to contain the chaos and tamp down the violence." That's where the argument is happening now, and that's where there are very convincing arguments (in my view) on both sides.

Reihan: '00s Nostalgia

As 2007 draws to a close, it's time to steel ourselves for the '00s retrospectives. Remember Ellen Feiss?

Possibly the greatest advertisement ever made, much better than the unreleased Ellen Feiss Powerbook video. But yeah, she still seems pretty stoned.

What a totally strange decade. The world was collapsing, yet the culture was vibrant and vital. In the near future, The American Scene will have a mini-symposium on the '00s: what were the unique and likely to last cultural phenomena? The return of Weltanschauung politics, Web 2.0 and the democratization of culture, the death or transcendence of hip-hop, etc. ...

Reihan: The Googlopticon?

This will be an amazing book.

One of the great attractions of Google is that it appears to offer so many powerful services for “free,” that is, for no remuneration. But there is a non-monetary transaction at work between Google and its users. We get Web search, email, Blogger platforms, and YouTube videos. Google gets our habits and predilections so it can more efficiently target advertisements to us. Google’s core business is consumer profiling. It keeps dossiers on all of us. Yet we have no idea how substantial or accurate these digital portraits are. This project will generate a better sense of what is at stake in this “gift” transaction and will generate new theories of corporate surveillance that get beyond the trite “Panopticon” model.

Call this the non-fiction answer to Cory Doctorow's Scroogled.

And how does this map onto changing generational attitudes about privacy, explored in Emily Nussbaum's rivetingly brilliant "Say Everything." David Brin's now-decade-old The Transparent Societyhttp://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html, a blogosphere favorite, explored the promise and peril of this kind of openness, ultimately coming down on the side that greater transparency is very good. I tend to agree. The wonderful 1-800-GOOG-411 harvests our voice information to build better speech recognition technology. I am an eager and enthusiastic participant in this effort. But who will own all of this information? I almost wish they were forced to work with a consortium of public and private entities when working on projects of this vast scope, to better ensure that these technologies will diffuse rapidly.

Reihan: Why the Tesla Roadster Won't Transform the Way We Drive

FuturePundit pours cold water on a very ambitious project.

They've got a car they've designed with very light and expensive materials. They probably have little or no luggage space. I bet it doesn't do well in crash tests either. They are using the best batteries they can find. Yet it is good for only 245 miles. Plus, once you've driven three and a half to four hours with it you've got to stop and wait just as long for it to recharge. This is a local car, not suitable for cross-country travel. In order for batteries to totally replace liquid fuels future batteries have got to store more electric power per unit weight and be capable of recharge in 1% of the time of current best-of-breed batteries. Is this physically possible?

I certainly hope so. The great thing about FuturePundit is that every post is very thorough and offers plenty of background information. It is thus a terrific resource even for those who disagree with the editorial voice. Check it out.

Reihan: Speaking of Milk, and Climate Change

A poignant note from the milkman to The Oil Drum's Euan Mearns:

Dear Customer,

Doorstep Milk Prices - Sunday 30th September 2007

I am sure you will be well aware by now, from the extensive on-going press coverage, of the substantial increase in prices affecting the numerous agricultural associated products.

The primary factors influencing the increase in milk costs are due to the heightened demand for dairy products along with availablity issues. These issues are being intensified by the extreme weather conditions currenly being experienced around the world, which in turn has increased our costs considerably in recent months.

This increase will help to secure the future of our milk supply and the continutaion of the Doorstep Service.

Doortstep Price Increase as of 30th September 2007

Pint Glass - will increase by 4 pence per pint
500 ml carton - will increase by 4 pence per 500 mls

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your loyal custom and continued support.

Mearns ends his post on a dark note.

Does this provide a glimpse of the future? We may have to eat fewer eggs, less pork and bacon and drink less milk.

The prospect of drinking less milk is part of why I've moved well past the Lomborgs on the world on this issue; my current position is, let's take sweeping measures and lets offer many billions of dollars to anyone who can reliably scrape carbon and other harmful emissions out of the atmosphere and banish them for good.

Reihan: Cradle of Civilization

The controversial-yet-indispensable Razib Khan offers this handy map that tracks the diffusion of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent to points beyond.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Razib about the imperialism of the milk-drinkers: how a handful of light-eyed Volga dwellers, powered by immunity-bolstering cow milk, were able to transform the face of the world. (Milk: How A Frothy White Beverage Created All Civilization, and How the Irish Saved It, and How It Explains the World By Making the World Flat.) As a great lover of milk, this pleased me. And yet I thought about my indigenous ancestors facing off against these cow-loving hordes and I thought, "Does ancestral loyalty demand that I stick to milk?" I'll tell you this much: my ancestors clearly weren't drinking NesQuik, so I can give up the charade of wanting to live like them. For example, I also enjoy living in a structure with a roof.

Reihan: Kitsch Covers

I will take a principled stand. Kitsch covers of pop songs should be really excellent and faithful to the source material, like Ted Leo's celebrated "Since U Been Gone" cover. This Amanda Palmer cover of "Umbrella" is, as we used to say when I was a kid, "wack."

Have you found that your slang is now laughably out-of-date? I still like to say "rad." My plan is to stick with it, and have it become a kind of generational marker.

Reihan: Extremely Frustrated About Lack of Aliens in America on iTunes

Vulture said Aliens was brilliant way back in May, and they tantalizingly suggested that I "season pass it" via iTunes. As of yet, I can't. And so I still haven't seen the first episode. Given that the subject matter is of intense personal interest, I'm kicking myself for missing it. I also missed Matt Pond PA, thinking that his slightly somber music would prove soporific, and that I'd turn somnambulant (and perhaps get stabbed). Troy Patterson reviewed Aliens, but I still don't know what to expect.

Whoa! It appears "Luke" is the dad! And the previews are excellent! Let's cross our fingers.

Reihan: Tom Goldstein on the Coming Supreme Court Switcheroo

This piece, by supremely well-regarded Supreme Court analyst Tom Goldstein, is exactly the kind of political analysis I like: it is sensitive to context, it makes an effort to anticipate the predictable responses of activists, and it provides new information for casual readers.

The upshot is that the upcoming term won't end as this one did, with headlines and TV reports describing the court as profoundly conservative, triggering praise from the right and howls of protest from the left. Instead, we will see (mistaken) talk of the court's "surprising" tack back to the left. In fact, this commentary will be wrong: The justices and their views will be exactly the same come June 2008; it is the cases that will be different. But the misleading sense of direction that's likely when the term ends next June could make the court a galvanizing campaign issue for Republicans, not Democrats.

Yesterday, a friend noted that the tyranny of the clever argument can be paralyzing: some smart writers spend all of their energy thinking of something offbeat to say, when they could instead simply convey striking facts. I guess I suffer from this same disease, so I'm reluctant to criticize this tendency. But it does say something about the rising popularity of activist media relative to interpretive media in the opinion space. Perhaps because I'm a fogey, or at least fogey-identified, I still enjoy kooky-argument-driven stuff more.

Reihan: Words I'll Never Say

"He should shut up."

Daniel Larison and I disagree about a lot (I'm all about wage subsidies, robots, and Gramsci; he's more about the Southern Agrarians), but boy, he sure is smart, and evidently people who should be a little more generous or at least patient find him hard to understand.

One of my running jokes with friends is that I really like the idea of Weltanschauung parties. Say I worked out at the SPD gym, joined the Young Socialists militia, and bought all my groceries at the Rosa Luxemburg Foodmart. But when I read lines like the above I think, you know, that would probably be really bad.

Reihan: Understanding the Casualty Numbers

What should one take away from these apparently-encouraging casualty numbers? I mean this

The number of American troops and Iraqi civilians killed in the war fell in September to levels not seen in more than a year. The U.S. military said the lower count was at least partly a result of new strategies and 30,000 additional U.S. forces deployed this year.

and this

More dramatic, however, was the decline in Iraqi civilian, police and military deaths. The figure was 988 in September - 50 percent lower than the previous month and the lowest tally since June 2006, when 847 Iraqis died.

Pro-surge commentators seem confident that this is a byproduct of the surge, and that this is a sign of progress to come provided we stick with their proposed strategy. I imagine there's another interpretation. Who has the best take?

Reihan: Hurray for Dani Rodrik!

I say that as a general matter about the "heterodox" economist, who has done a tremendous amount to usefully complicate our thinking about trade barriers, capital flows, import substitution, the welfare state, and other issues falling under the rubric of globalization. His weblog is a delight.

I particularly like him for the reason I like his frequent interlocutor Tyler Cowen: I think Rodrik suffers from the some of the same cognitive biases that I do, in favor of the interesting answer and the interesting outcome. This leads me, and I think Rodrik, to sometimes underemphasize some obvious yet important truths.

But this specific "hurray" is for this short post, or at least the principle behind it. My hope is that the generation of lefty intellectuals represented by Chris Hayes, Brad Plumer, Dan Kurtz-Phelan, and Sasha Polakow-Suransky, and of course the Stakhanovites Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein, will displace books like The Shock Doctrine. That, alas, will take a while.

P.S.- From a reliably smart friend:

I'm fairly certain that the Naomi Klein review that Rodrik links to is written by someone who didn't read the book.

Reihan: Magazine Avenger

So it seems Entertainment Weekly did more than jack a clever featurelet from New York's Vulture, one of my favorite blogs. The victim of this outright thievery was an unnamed, often-masked comrade of mine. Clearly someone needs to be disciplined, possibly with an enormous atom-smashing hammer. Show yourself! And feel the force of my atom-smashing hammer!

Reihan: Putting the P in PMC

Briefly, I wrote a short post on private military contractors late last week, and a number of smart observers asked, among them Matt Yglesias, "Why private?" Robert Kaplan does an excellent job of laying out the key points in favor of PMCs. For me, the most important advantage they have is that, as John Robb put it (I should have excerpted his post), they are scalable and contingent. When you need trigger pullers, PMCs can deliver trigger pullers: they ramp up hiring, they train personnel for the tasks at hand or find them. Most are retired military personnel, but because these are nimble organizations, they can also draw on other sources. And when you no longer need trigger pullers, at the end of a short-term military campaign, say, PMCs shed staff. The same is not true of conventional military forces. That is very valuable.

P.S.- A friend, who has met a number of PMCs in Iraq, notes that they tend to have an impressive amount of local knowledge, more than is typical of US infantrymen. This is predictable: after all, they are older, more experienced, and they make it their business to learn as much as possible about their surroundings, and they are not slowed down by a sometimes unwieldy chain-of-command that isn't always good at getting soldiers the information they need when they need it. This is not to suggest that our volunteer army is anything less than highly competent and professional, but it's no surprise that smaller, nimbler organizations are going to be better and faster at learning. And when you're dealing with a fast-moving, ever-evolving insurgency (really a collection of dozens of groups with their own agendas), this counts for a lot.

Reihan: Very Specific Josh Ritter Track Recommendations

I own three Josh Ritter albums, and I've listened to and enjoyed scattered tracks from Animal Years and The Golden Age of Radio. In truth, The Golden Age of Radio was purchased for the sole purpose of extracting sappy tracks for mixtapes. Animal Years, in contrast, contains the perfect protest song, "Girl in the War." There is nothing explicitly political about the song, and it's not nearly as dark or eerie as anything done by John Vanderslice, the master of paranoiac, cinematic Iraq-obsessed music. Rather, "Girl in the War" is sweet and affecting, and it turns on a reversal that while not uncommon is certainly rooted in reality: a boyfriend or husband praying for the safe return of his girlfriend or wife from the war.

Paul said to Peter you got to rock yourself a little harder
Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire
But I got a girl in the war Paul the only thing I know to do
Is turn up the music and pray that she makes it through

While training from Washington to New York on Friday, I passed the time reading The Abstinence Teacher (more on that later) and listening to Ritter's latest, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. From beginning to end, the album is near-flawless, assuming you like this sort of twangy, jangly music. (Which I do, despite the part of me that mocks the rest of me for this sad fact.)

If for whatever reason you are reluctant to buy the entire album, I recommend "To The Dogs or Whoever," "Mind's Eye" (which sounds slightly Spoonish, and incidentally it seems that Spoon the band has displaced spoon the utensil according to Google, which is saying something), "The Temptation of Adam," "Open Doors," "Real Long Distance," and "Empty Hearts."

Reihan: Subway Demographics

Rest assured, political blogging will return shortly. For now, more half-asleep reflections.

I recently told a friend that I'd sooner have my eyes scooped out with spoons than be caught reading a book commonly consumed on either the F or L trains in New York, which, as she helpfully pointed out, is kind of idiotic. To this day I haven't read The Corrections, and I don't think I ever will. Indeed, when someone tells me that, "Oh man, it's actually a really great book," I immediately think to myself, "when we're living in a post-apocalyptic 'time of troubles,' this person is not, for the good of humanity, sharing my bunker or my canned peas." The trouble is I quite like Tom Perrotta, so I've already caved. The smart and principled thing to do would be to follow the lead of my good friend GCAW and only read book that are twenty years old or older, to know they've stood the test of time.

Continue reading "Reihan: Subway Demographics" »

Reihan: Question Time

Just a reminder: all posts that begin "Reihan: Yackety-schmackety, something incoherent" are written by Reihan Salam, not Ross Douthat. I stress this because I don't want you to think that Ross has gone mad. Love-mad, perhaps, but not mad in the, "I'm a character in Jane Eyre, and I have the sneaking suspicion that someone has locked me in a closet," not to be confused with Trapped in the Closet.

The following is a reflective post that can be safely skipped.

Continue reading "Reihan: Question Time" »

Reihan: My Favorite Critic

Creating a kerfuffle is a commerical imperative. So I'm of course very skeptical when I'm told David Edelstein (long one of my favorite movie critics) is courting controversy by endorsing Brian De Palma's latest. Who exactly is going to attack Edelstein? I assue a doughty band of conservatives will go through the motions of blasting De Palma's film (which I haven't seen), and I assume Edelstein will treat them with withering contempt. As for Edelstein's friends and fans, who are many, they will cheer him on.

Now of course, Edelstein is raging against the powerful, specifically the "warmongers" in the White House, etc. And of course these "warmongers" will do absolutely nothing to disturb the bubble of (relative) domestic comfort most Americans enjoy (relative to military families, and of course relative to Iraqis fleeing their homes and losing their lives, part of the "collateral damage" De Palma evokes). This is part of the reason performing rage can be so gratifyng: it suggests a more expansive moral sense, and it is an implicit rebuke to Bush's manifest failure to call for shared sacrifice.

Let's accept that the invasion of Iraq was an inexcusable blunder, and let's accept that the burdens are overwhelmingly borne by a small minority of Americans. When De Palma talks about "urgency," I have to assume he means that we urgently need to withdraw US forces from Iraq. That, of course, is a much trickier argument, and it's not clear that incendiary images clarify rather than cloud our thinking. Consider the incendiary images and bloody shirts that have started so many wars, including, arguably, the war in Iraq.

Edelstein references the "noise machine" that will surely crank up to attack Brian De Palma. But again, who really believes that (a) a mostly marginalized group of conservative (or rather "right-wing") critics will be able to destroy or even mildly dent Brian De Palma's reputation as an auteur? I'm not even sure a string of astonishingly bad movies could do that at this point. And (b) who believes that a movie like Redacted would get a wide and enthusiastic audience in the absence of this "noise machine"? Yes, it will pack the art-houses. Or it won't. A ferocious "noise machine" can only help in that regard. As for the "other America," the 95 percent who would never consider seeing such a film (it's tough to find babysitters, and why spend an evening watching something like Redacted?), the "noise machine" isn't exactly making much of a difference.

This is one of the inescapable dilemmas of cultural commentary. We need to believe that our work is vitally important. The right-wing and left-wing professional agitators need to keep the cultural temperature at or near the boiling point, to curry favor, to build audiences, to raise donations. And ... and again, the most important issue is: are Iraqi children better off or worse off under a continuing American military occupation? I don't think the answer is obvious. I'm inclined to think we're doing some good, and that the sectarian violence could get far worse, but this is a near-run thing.

What I do know is that no, Redacted really isn't vitally important and standing up to the "noise machine" is a surefire route to bestselling success.

In Edelstein's post, he references Ross.

In his Atlantic blog, right-winger Ross Douthat makes fun of my review of Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, which also touches on the moral devastation of Americans in Iraq. I said in my column that although it’s a clunky piece of storytelling and a third-rate mystery, it’s also a powerful and important film. Douthat sees this as representative of a liberal tying himself up in knots to praise a movie he dislikes but agrees with politically. If he thinks those are knots, he should read me on Michael Moore!

Reihan: Breaking Through

I need to write at greater length about Shellenberger and Nordhaus, the men behind "The Death of Environmentalism" and the forthcomng Break Through. For now I'll just note that I think Dave Hawkins misunderstands their very important and very persuasive argument.

In truth, I'd much rather hear what Brad Plumer has to say first. A friend of mine and I were recently talking about how much we enjoy Plumer's idiosyncatic blog, and we both expressed the hope that he won't become a political beat reporter. That is a noble profession, to be sure, but my sense is that Plumer's comparative advantage lies elsewhere, specifically in synthesizing Vulcanian logic, an impressive command of scientific evidence, and a deep familiarity with many shades of leftish thinking. To the extent Plumer becomes a muckraker, it ought to be more in the vein of Multinational Monitor than Roll Call.

Reihan: Meet Your New Overlord

Via Engadget, the ElmoSapien.

Incidentally, this image bears a striking resemblance to my own winterwear. And people wonder why I hardly ever catch cold. More, and more coherent, blogging to come. I will now submerge myself in a briny tank of knowledge.

Reihan: Why Private Military Contractors Are A Good Thing

A debate has erupted over US reliance on private military contractors in Iraq and elsewhere. My sense is that the brilliant and decidedly uneven Robert Young Pelton, a staunch critic of PMCs, has set the tone for the debate. My own view is different. We do depend on PMCs, we're likely to depend on them even more over time, and this is a very good thing. Consider John Robb's thoughts on the subject.

The defining fact of our time, as John Mueller has argued, is the decline of war. This, of couse, contradicts the Colin Gray view and I can see how it might seem strange given the bloody conflicts that dominate the headlines. But this doesn't change the normative shift that has taken place over the last century, from a time when military aggression was seen as both inevitable and acceptable to the present, when it is seen as an offense against all things good and decent. A similar normative shift was behind the decline of enslavement in the West, which began long before the vile practice became economically impracticable. Ideology matters.

The kind of conflicts we're seeing and are likely to see are far more like crime, pervasive and opportunistic, than like conventional interstate warfare. The patriotic sentiments that motivated volunteer armies in the past are harder to apply to campaigns designed to strengthen vulnerable foreign states, or to limit the extent of bunkering and other criminal activities that have no obvious ideological valence. And so we will need to rely on skilled professionals to help police the world.

To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about abuses committed by PMCs. That is a failure of the US and Iraqi governments, but not of PMCs as a matter of principle.

Reihan: What's Good for Wikipedia is Good for America

That is a maxim I can get behind.

Seth Roberts reports on a brief conversation with Aaron Swartz, a savvy activist (savvtivist?) who is frustrated by Wikipedia's failings. The basic take-away: how impressive, and how useful, would Wikipedia be if it had leadership as far-sighted and competent as that of Craigslist? (Check out this amazing chart.)

Reihan: The Frugal Players Club

Recently, my good friend Josh suggested that Delonte West of the Seattle SuperSonics and Roy Williams of the Detroit Lions should double-date: all evidence suggests that they'd be drawn to the same kind of woman, namely a down-to-earth gal with a love of fried foods. First, Delonte (from an ESPN story titled, appropriately enough, "Flowers, Popeye's and romance"):

Continue reading "Reihan: The Frugal Players Club" »

Reihan: Hello!

As you may have read earlier on, my good friend and co-author Ross Douthat is getting married very soon and he'll be out of the country for some time after that. Once he returns, he will be rested and ready to take the blogosphere by storm, if necessary subduing rival blogs with a series of shattering (rhetorical) blows. My advice to said rivals: get your emergency preparedness kits in order.

So who is this Reihan Salam? Rather than bore you with biographical details, I will list a few things I like. Note that I'm deliberately excluding things produced by personal friends or colleagues. I'm also excluding things that could embarrass or haunt me in the years to come, thus radically reducing the scope of this enterprise. In particular, I'm thinking of my favorite shirts. When I idly daydream about how I'd fare in a post-apocalyptic landscape, thoughts prompted in part by the recently-resurrected CBS drama Jericho, I think about whether my shirts will survive the unending chaos.

Continue reading "Reihan: Hello!" »

Away

I'll be gone, getting married and honeymooning, for the next seventeen days. I trust nothing of any importance will take place in that span, but in case it does, Reihan, my frequent collaborator and erstwhile co-blogger, will be offering pointed commentary in this space. So don't go away.

Weekend Linkage

Christine Rosen on social networking and narcissism.

The Derb explains why he is not an Islamophobe.

Peter Galbraith on Iran's strategic victory.

If you missed the Labash-Ferguson one-two punch in the last two issues of the Standard, you should remedy that oversight.

And while I'm definitely on the "Hillary probably can't be stopped" bandwagon, and I think the parallels between 1980 and 2008 can be counted on the fingers of Homer Simpson's left hand, it is remarkable how quickly conventional wisdom can get up-ended in American politics.