National Review’s Kevin Williamson has a new article about the parties’ historical positions on civil rights, which I guess is a preview of an upcoming book which I guess is going to make the argument that the point of the Great Society was to turn the nation into helpless wards of the government so that they would vote for Democrats from then on. Which is both silly (in that it is historical nonsense) and pernicious (because it attacks motives, and because it assumes a lack of agency on the part of most voters), but isn’t the main point of the current article, so I’ll mostly stick with that.
(Okay, I have to put this somewhere. Jonathan Chait has written a terrific piece on Williamson’s article, and he posted it as I was finishing this one. I’m just going to leave mine as is — it’s very much overlapping, but he focuses more on Republicans and I’m more interested here in the Democrats. You should read his).
Williamson makes the case that Republicans have always been in favor of civil rights against the racist Democrats. It’s perfectly fair for Republicans to point to their long history of supporting civil rights, up through the adoption of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And it’s also certainly true that the history of the Democratic Party is filled with racism.
But it’s bizarre to say that the Democrats didn’t flip on civil rights.
I was going to regale you all with a brilliant, American Nations-powered analysis of President Barack Obama’s less than stellar performance in the West Virginia and Kentucky Democratic primaries, but am pleased to see that Alec MacGillis has already done so over at The New Republic. MacGillis writes:
Obama certainly is a vulnerable incumbent, as suggested by the latest national polling showing him only slightly ahead of Mitt Romney. But Kentucky and Arkansas offer little in the way of affirmation. For the hundredth time, let me suggest that people take a look at this map. It shows the counties where Obama in 2008 got a lower share of the general election vote than John Kerry had… It is a virtually contiguous band of territory stretching from southwestern Pennsylvania through Appalachia and across the Upland South, finally petering out in north-central Texas. It is, almost to a T, what Colin Woodard, in his fascinating new ethnographic history of North America, American Nations, defined as the territory of the Borderlanders…
Indeed, as I pointed out in the book, Obama is terribly unpopular in Greater Appalachia, whose borders you can examine here. The thing is, so is Mitt Romney, who lost by wide margins to (Appalachian favorite) Rick Santorum or (Deep Southenrner) Newt Gingrich in primary contests from Mississippi and Alabama to Ohio and Illinois. Both men are seen as highly educated Yankees with a questionable commitment to the Southern Evangelical worldview: not a winning combination to begin with, and only worsened if you happen to be African American or Mormon.
Bottom line: Greater Appalachia has always been a lost cause for Mr. Obama, but Mr. Romney is unlikely to inspire an unprecedented rush to the polls to bolster his chances of taking key swing states like Ohio, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, each of which have significant Appalachian sections. Instead, I suggest, look to the Midlands….
Given the overall condition of the human race during most of the history of the civilized world, you would think that simply not having bubonic plague would be enough to put most of us in cheerful moods — but, no, we want a hot tub too.
That’s from The First National Bank of Dad, by David Owen, a delightful and short book mostly about teaching your children financial literacy, but about a great deal more too. Russ Roberts interviewed the author in a recent episode of EconTalk.
A new Gallup poll shows that the percent of Americans calling themselves pro-choice has fallen to 41%. In 2008, when that number hit 42%, there was a predictable flurry of news attention. So I want to call attention to what I wrote then. In short, this “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice” question obscures the true nature of American attitudes toward abortion. Support for the right to abortion depends strongly on the circumstances of the pregnancy. They cannot be summarized with the labels “pro-choice” and “pro-life.”
Moreover, and most importantly, more nuanced measures show little of the fluctuation that Gallup’s pro-choice vs. pro-life measure shows. Indeed Gallup’s new poll confirms this finding:
However, it is notable that while Americans’ labeling of their position has changed, their fundamental views on the issue have not.
Twitter offers the pleasure of knowing what casual acquaintances are doing, and to occasionally catch useful or fun events you wouldn’t otherwise know were happening.
Last week, I was giving a talk in Washington, DC. I had some unexpected time to kill, and I happened to see that @ezraklein and @edwardGLuce were participating in a very good, albeit sobering Brookings panel discussion concerning Luce’s new book, Time to start thinking: America in the age of descent.
Luce provided an excellent bill of particulars about our education system, our dysfunctional political structures, and the unprecedented economic competition we face from China, Brazil, and elsewhere. It seems to me that the obvious decline of American power, in many forms, is the elephant in the room in many matters of global import. George W. Bush accelerated this decline through tragically misguided policies at home and abroad. Yet the trends go deeper than any one administration, even one as disastous as Bush 43.
Ezra Klein followed Luce’s presentation by asking some basic and challenging questions. Have we really been harmed by our nation’s relative decline in (say) global GDP? Other than the blow to our national ego, it’s not clear we are harmed in any way by the decline of our relative economic preeminence on the world stage. Klein published his core argument in a nice column, here.
Many years ago, I counselled an anxious young woman who felt that the magic was going out of her marriage. Her husband used to say the sweetest things to her in intimate moments but didn’t any more. His extraordinary emotional vulnerability at the moment he proposed marriage had brought a tear to her eye, as it had to her mother’s, her friends, her mother’s friends, her friends’ friends and all the other people she told about it. Once showered with compliments about how lucky she was to have such a romantic husband, she was now disappointed that he never seemed to whisper the sweet nothings that had once got her so many “you lucky girl!” plaudits from her social network.
I raised the obvious question:
“Does your husband know that you tell everyone about all the intimate things he says to you?”
“Oh yes, why at Thanksgiving dinner last year my mother repeated the story about how he cried on our first anniversary because he was so happy. Everyone laughed because it was so sweet.”
I said “Hmmmm….” (which is what many of us headshrinkers do when we are thinking “Jesus Tapdancing Christ”).
But then I recovered from shock and said something like “If you want your husband to say things to you that are special, that he would only say to his beloved wife, why don’t you treat them as if they were special, instead of something worthy of general consumption? If he realizes he’s always effectively talking to a big audience, he’s probably not going to be as vulnerable and intimate as he would be if he knew he were just talking to you.”
I think of that woman when I read about all the Facebook users who have a gazillion friends. Specifically, I wonder what happens to specialness and quality of friendship when what you would normally share only with one or two people becomes something you share with a larger number. At some point do people feel less like they have a true relationship with someone and more like they are one of hundreds on a mailing list, akin to recipients of a mass-printed annual holiday letter? I recognize that technically, you can set different levels of intimacy in Facebook, but I also recognize that many people don’t bother to do so. Over time, will you lose interest in the Facebook sharings of dear friends once you understand they are sharing the same things at the same time with people they may barely know?
A few months ago, Jacob Kirkegaard was congratulating the EU’s northern member states for having discovered how awesome brinkmanship was as a mode of bargaining over Greek policy reforms. As I noted then, brinkmanship, contra Kirkegaard, is a terrible way of making policy. It only works to the extent that the threat of catastrophe for all involved is a real one. And, to the extent that the threat of catastrophe is real, bluffing and seeking to constrain oneself in ways that will oblige the other side to do what you want them to do (Schelling’s definition of strategy), may work out very badly indeed. If you’ve miscalculated, both you and the other side may find yourselves in deep, deep trouble. To quote Branislav Slantchev yet again
Obviously, these are very dangerous tactics; they would not work unless they were dangerous because it is the generation of risk that makes them potentially worthwhile.
A weaker version of this critique applies to Matthew Yglesias’ more recent take on Grexit.
a short-term departure is much less likely than the hype would lead you to believe. Everyone has big incentives to bluff right now, but if Greece does end up leaving the euro it’ll happen later as part of a broader and more comprehensive split. … there’s an excellent chance that everyone is bluffing. Tsipras is a bit like a person who’s wandered into a rich guy’s living room and is threatening to shoot himself in the head unless the rich guy hands over some cash. It’s not a very credible threat … On the other hand, it might make sense for the rich guy to pay up. Brains splattered all over the carpet and furniture might be more expensive to clean than just paying the guy to go away. … In the case of the eurozone, the carpet and furniture are Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. Once it becomes clear that an exit from the euro is a real possibility, the odds are that people who hold bank accounts in those countries will want to take their money out.
The point is that while Germany would obviously prefer not to offer Greece more generous terms, there’s good reason to think that they’d be willing to do it. By the same token, it makes sense for Greece to ask. In essence, the situation is fertile territory for bluffing. Tsipras pretends it makes sense for Greece to demand a better deal, and Angela Merkel pretends it makes sense to let Germany walk away from the euro. This game of chicken might end up badly, but the frantic press reports are mostly a reflection of the bluffs not the actual likelihood of Greece leaving.
The final sentences of this post are absolutely correct – press reports do underplay the extent to which both Greece and Germany are engaged in bluffing and brinkmanship. But this doesn’t sit at all well with the claim that “if Greece does end up leaving the euro it’ll happen later as part of a broader and more comprehensive split.” It’s precisely because there’s some possibility of catastrophe that this kind of bluffing is worthwhile. Furthermore, the risk of catastrophe is increasing over time, as e.g. Greek citizens start transferring their deposits to non-Greek banks. Nor does the claim that Tsipras’s threat “is not very credible” sit well with the argument that it might make sense for Germany to pay up. If the threat is non-credible, Germany simply has to sit back and call Tsipras’ bluff. This said, if Matt is overly sanguine, the pattern of bluff and counter-bluff suggests that Tyler Cowen is wrong to think that the politics make any deal impossible. If there weren’t any possible resolution, there wouldn’t be any incentive to engage in crisis bargaining. What we’re seeing suggests that the players on both sides think that there is a real chance of catastrophe, but also a real chance of a deal.
At a guess, Greece has considerably more bargaining leverage than it might seem to at first. One useful index of bargaining strength is relative levels of sensitivity to breakdown/catastrophe/failure to reach a deal. It’s plausible that Greece is relatively indifferent to breakdown at this point – years of grinding austerity inside EMU seem barely preferable to the costs of exiting the euro. In contrast, Germany could see the collapse of the euro (and consequent very serious economic costs) if a Greek exit leads to the collapse of confidence in Spanish, Irish, and worst of all, Italian banks. If I were to lay a bet on which side is likely to fold first, I’d be putting my money on the Germans.
You know how I’m always complaining about how old Members of Congress have become? Well, I learned something new about it: it turns out that newly elected Senators now are a lot older than newly elected Senators used to be. I wrote it up for a Salon piece over the weekend, so check that out for the data, and for a terrific picture of 1972 Joe Biden that they found to put with it.
(Quick caveat: it’s a Salon column, not a proper study. I looked at four large Senate classes from the past, and the most recent three Senate classes, and there’s a gap of as much as a decade. Looks real to me, and that it will continue this cycle, but it is possible that it’s just a fluke, although I don’t think so).
Two things. I’ve complained about old Congresses quite a bit, but I haven’t really talked about consequences — I’m very reluctant to try to be very speculative about things like this. I’m not going to tell you that Congress would be more popular if the average Senator was 50 instead of 60, or that their age has anything to do with the feeling people have that Congress is out of touch…I don’t think there’s any way of knowing those things, and at any rate we don’t know it. But I will note one thing…I was reading Marc Ambinder’s list of ten things he learned while reporting in Washington, and two of them are about Washington being out of the current US mainstream on sex and drugs. If that’s true — and I don’t know that it is, but it may be — then I can’t imagine that it really helps that so many Senators and Members of the House were born before 1950.
The second thing is about causes. I really have no idea why incoming Senators have become much older. The commenters over at Salon were sure it was about money — that you have to be rich to be a Senator, and you’re more likely to be rich when you’re older — but that doesn’t seem right to me. I will note that Joe Biden was elected to the Senate at age 29 in the heyday of weak parties and strong, independent candidates, the kind that Alan Ehrenhalt wrote about in The United States of Ambition. Does something about the way candidates are selected in the current era of strong, networked parties yield older Senators?
Or is there some other good reason for the increasing age of incoming Senators? Anyone have any ideas?
If you’re curious how the race to replace retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) is going, I’ve got some campaign finance data for you to chew on.
For those who haven’t been following the Maine race closely, the conventional wisdom is that former governor Angus King, a two-term independent, is the frontrunner, and that the national Democratic Party may be sitting out the race. (A King in hand being perhaps better than a Democrat in the bush, particularly since he’s likely to caucus with the Dems.) If true, the reasoning goes, the biggest challenge to King winning would be the emergence of a strong Republican backed by an ocean of super PAC money.
I took a detailed look at the first quarter disclosures of all eleven candidates for the Maine Sunday Telegram. At that early stage -Snowe didn’t announce her retirement until the end of February—the Democrats have yet to get involved, and the GOP has made a symbolic down payment on most - but not all - of the party’s primary contestants.
In his first month of campaigning, King raised what is, for Maine, a respectable $173,561, more than any other candidate in the quarter. (The state has just 1.3 million people and cheap television ad rates.)
Snowe has contributed to just one candidate, Maine Attorney General William Schneider, while liberal Democrats are split between two Portland-area legislators, Cynthia Dill and Jon Hinck.
One potentially formidable GOP candidate, State Treasurer Bruce Poloquin, didn’t raise or spend more than $5000, so has yet to file a disclosure. Independently wealthy, he largely self-financed an unsuccessful run for governor in 2010, and presumably could do so again.
Ross Douthat asserts that religious faith is essential to America. But his own understanding of religion is suspiciously selective. By Paul Baumann05/21/2012
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