So Far in “American Prometheus”

I am about a third of the way through American Prometheus.  A few things I have learned:

• And I feel bad about my early academic mistakes.  Robert Oppenheimer apparently left a POISON APPLE for one of his professors! 
• When I move back to DC and become successful and affluent, I need to break into Kai Bird’s social circle. 
• The FBI did some SERIOUSLY illegal surveillance of American citizens in the 30’s. 
• Robert Oppenheimer does not strike me as the type of person whose company I would have enjoyed if we were contemporaries.  I appreciate his passion for literature and learning, but his stubbornness seems like it might have been tough to live with. 
• I really enjoy reading biographies of people who are thought of as brilliant and successful starting out feeling completely lost and out of place – now THAT is something I can relate to. 
• I really need to update the "Reading Material" Tab on the side of the site. 

That’s it for now.  As soon as I finish this, I am going to start Pynchon, and I think that I shall "Live blog" my experiences taking on this book.  We’ll see how that works. 

Do National Parties Ruin a Vision of Republican Statecraft?

Last week, I posted a note I wrote on Balkinization in response to a post by Professor Levinson, whereby I essentially advanced a notion of "Republican Statecraft" that Professor Levinson was kind enough to respond to by writing:

As I’ve said before, I think one problem with adverting to the notion
of "republican statesmanship" endorsed by the Founders is that they
presumed no parties and, therefore, a high degree of non-partisan
virtue especially on the part of the president. The vision didn’t
survive 1800

First and foremost, I want to say that I am appreciative of Professor Levinson’s energy for engagement and his truly spectacular intellect, and I feel quite privileged that he read my comment and thought about it, especially given the "trollish" nature of many of the responders to his posts. 

However, I do not personally find it convincing that the notion of "republican statecraft" that the founders had in mind needs to be (nor ought to be) scrapped because they did not forsee the national party system.  Certainly, the national parties that have appeared on the scene have changed the landscape of our politics, and I certainly agree with Professor Levinson that there is nothing inherently compelling about referring to the Founders on Constitutional question (which has always struck me as the type of "Legalism" that drove Judith Shklar up the wall).  But the goals of governance still have the same requirements – someone has to do the actual thinking and acting in particular ways, situated in particular contexts, with particular time-limits, histories, prejudices, emotional states, and physical and technological realities. 

The question remains: how do we organize these political activities (thoughts and deeds) into an actually lasting, working republic?  I believe that Professor Levinson’s point is that political parties mess with the "balanced equation" for how they saw our polity being organized because parties collect and concentrate so much political power, energy, and attention into two organizations, of which one usually dominates for the healthy portion of an era.  There is something very convincing about this argument, and yet, it is still a little bit reductionist.  The activities that take place in "civil society", public deliberation, education, uncontrollable historical events, etc. all force parties to shift with the changing needs of the public over time. I believe the Republic needs some reforms, and some changes to elections and the party system might be helpful… but I am not convinced that it is the whole game. 

Parties need voters to win, and part of the problem I see in political parties is that they, in order to gain popular support, appeal to a political sociology held by the public that is already too damaged to effectively run a Republic at anything resembling peak prosperity.  Getting rid of what is preying upon your weaknesses does not equate with getting rid of the weakness itself, and that is, in my view, the difference between myself in Professor Levinson.  I think he is right to want to kill the weeds, but I fear he is not actually killing the roots, so to speak. 

Happy Thanksgiving

Off to brave the traffic… I will be back next week. 

Phil “The Thrill” Strikes Back

And here’s the kicker: it wouldn’t be that hard. Really. A single legal
council for the entirety of that courtroom would have been enough to
make a dramatic difference. Or just a paralegal with a notepad. Hell,
even a regular viewer of Law & Order might do. S/he could be in and
out in an hour. Just someone. Anyone. Someone to stand outside the
courtroom and advise the overwhelmed tenants not to take the first dumb
offer the plaintiff lawyers suggest or to do what the landlords advise
just for the sake of expediency.

Go see what he’s writing about. 

The 100 Worst “Top 100 Lists of All Time” of All Time

No, I’m not going to actually make that list – though I think it would be an extremely hilarious thing to do.  Thanks to "Celebritology", I think that I have my new vote for the number one worst "top 100 list of all time" of all time.  That would be Time Magazine’s Top 100 albums of all time list.  Obviously, all "top 100" lists are subjective and people always have favorites that get slighted.  That will not be my objection here (my favorite album made the list anyway*).  My objection is how incredibly thoughtless and lazy this list seems to be.  First off, why do they count compilations of songs from different albums as a candidate for best album?  If they are eligible, why not my mix CD of ten of the greatest songs of all time?  Who could beat that?  It’s not an album if it’s a compilation.  Some of the albums on the list actually have songs that are thematically linked and even have the traces of a storyline.  Elvis’ 30 number one hits, not so much. 

Most of these lists, like them or not, reveal a bias because the criteria used to determine "best" will bias some things more than others.  This upsets people, but at least it provides some semblance of a coherent methodology to the choosing.  The Time Magazine list reveals that it is far better to have clear and biased methodology than to pick 100 recognizable albums, seemingly at random, and declare them the best. 

* I also may or may not be the commenter named "steven" who wrote the post, "Hello, BECK??"

On Shaming

A friend of mine recalls a story about getting someone banned on Metafilter.  He writes:

What I still haven’t settled, despite the callout, is whether it’s
really better for a community to exclude its most intolerant members,
or whether the real goal of such experiences is to shame them into
self-reappraisal.

Either way, I hardly see it as a valuable tool.  Banning someone from being a memebr or shaming them are tools of discipline and conformity, and not, ways to bring about understanding or appraisal.  Shaming teaches nothing, it is an act for the security of the people doing the shaming, and it likely does nothing but wound the person shamed – I’ll let you follow through the Platonic argument on why that would be bad for yourself.  When I look out at my classes, I see practicaly nothing but a mass of students who think that they are playing some great game to avoid the disciplinary power of the teacher, because all they have learned in school is to try to avoid shame, and not, to substantively learn their subjects. 

It’s my sense that our society is not under-disciplined, it’s over disciplined, to the point where people have forgotten the substance of what discipline might be good for because they are so regularly confronted with it, they have given up the subject matter for games of rebellion and control with their teachers, bosses, neighbors, etc.  Nowhere is this more unacceptable than in the University, which is the last great chance to give up berating the bad student, and sell him or her on the fact that there is actual joy and value in coming to know the world more completely and being curious about things.  As that breaks down, I see more and more teachers who blame their students for passing up these joys, which in essence, condemns them to a life of dulled senses.  Teachers get angrier, meaner, more cynical, and they think, in turn, more discipline is necessary for these faulty students.  But the fault is ours, at least more of it then we are usually willing to own.   

What do you mean, “only Darfur?”

Anne Applebaum has a curious bad essay in today’s Washington Post.  Ms. Applebaum finds it strange that Darfur is getting so much attention as to pressure politicians into producing results — since not-so-secret secret prisons in Iran and North Korea exist and no one bats an eye. 

I have to problems with Ms. Applebaum’s reading of the situation.  First, I do not think that it is very helpful to think about either genocide or the gulag in the way that she seems to try to formulate them.  It is puzzling that Ms. Applebaum would pick Iran and North Korea as examples as other places where known abuses take place.  Both nations are highly militarized and it should shock no one that they are human rights violators.  What is strange about using them as examples is that there are less imposing regimes that are bigger violators of human rights besides Iran and North Korea that can be used as examples — Uzbekistan and the D.R. Congo come to mind.  These examples prove to be more egregious than Iran and North Korea and much easier to do something about since they pull much less weight in the world.  Ms. Applebaum seems guilty of running to the cartoonish caricature of the "axis of evil,"  the idea that evil  manifests itself in movements and with people who willingly command it, as if there are literally people who run nations like Skeletor from the children’s cartoon He-Man.  This, in fact, leads us to the problem of equating genocide with the Gulag, as Applebaum does.

Applebaum writes, quite foolishly, in my opinion:

Nor do I mean to deny that "history will judge us," for surely it will.
But when future generations look back on this era, they will judge us
not only for how we responded to the most primitive and the most
apolitical of horrors. They will also judge us by the consistency with
which Western and international institutions battled sophisticated
totalitarianism in all its forms:

Genocide is not necessarily totalitarian, nor does totalitarianism need genocide, or even the threat of genocide to go on.  Applebaum equates the two, but they are not the same.  In fact, they are not the same in any instance of totalitarianism, as the elements of totalitarianism in any situation crystallize from a vast array of themes and forces that, in and of themselves do not constitute the key element for making a totalitarian regime possible.  Given this, her call for consistency is impossible, and her equating political prisoners with genocide baffling, to the point where one gets the suspicion that her piece is nothing more than a thinly veiled call to raise arms against those two countries which she curiously picked out as examples rather than a call for understanding genocide and totalitarianism and the ways in which we can truly understand and combat them.

Second, I find it hard to call the incredibly slow build up to a as-yet not formally completed coalition to send a force that may or may not do anything substantive several years too late " a stunning achievement."    Many have died in Darfur, and many more have been displaced.  Rather than acknowledge that the time for action was quite a long time ago, Ms. Applebaum opts for the truly curious decision to congratulate ourselves on Darfur before we have even accomplished anything. 

To Professor Levinson

Professor Levinson,

Professor Levinson,

  My concern with your suggestion is that your vision of democracy does not seem to have the "complexity" rich enough to govern effectively either.  I consider the truest words spoken on political regimes to be Montesquieu’s: "Many things govern men: climate, religion, laws, the maxims of government, examples of past things, mores and manners; a general spirit is formed as a result." (Book 19, Chapter 4)  If you look at this list, many of the factors that go into the everyday workings of the regime (assuming it’s a valid statement) are then at least partially non-govenrmental.  I wonder if any change to the voting rules can really correct our course if the causes of what worries you are caught up in all of the tangled interrelations of these forces that come together and crystallize into important historical movements and moments.      

You suggest that the Constitution ought to be more concerned with today than the past.  I believe this is true, but references to the past to see what the Founders believed can be used not merely to make some inductive claim about how the Constitution will work today, but can also gives us insight to the careful consideration of how various people have tried to manage the state in their times.  I doubt you would disagree with the distinction as you were, I believe, arguing against those who reify original understandings.  The reason that I raise the distinction is to note that we still have to look back because the government is more than just decision rules – it is a nexus of tons of relationships, mired in its unending and always changing complexity, and changing a few rules here and there needs to be very carefully considered. We must consider such changes not simply on the merit of the rule in the abstract, but also in the context of how such changes alter all of the relations that form not only the institutional practice of our government and our aspirations for a good political regime. 

I think it should be quite obvious that rampant majoritarianism, when majorities are subject to make decisions based on many of the contingent forces that are on Montesquieu’s list, is not likely to  produce solutions to the deeper problems in the ways you would hope for.  Our regime is designed to provide statecraft in times when our leaders our greedy and not very smart.  If it is not providing adequate statecraft in such cases, one can conclude that the desing does not work and needs revision, as you indicate.  But we live in an age of overwhelming historical, social, and technological change.  This change has facilitated an attitude that when statecraft fails, we need a change in leaders and decision rules that get us leaders.  But, this view gives up on Republican statecraft from the beginning because it emphasizes selecting political leaders and the brueacratic agency of the state over the enormous, and widely distributed power in the people.  Perhaps the real problem is that this power in the people has been used for economic gain at the cost of the republic a a whole. We have become that nation that Theodore Roosevelt warned of, the one focused on "ill-gotten wealth and ignoble prosperity" that will "perish, as it deserves to perish, from this earth."  Our "general spirit" is  a confused mess, and it would take far more than a different President to sort it out. In short, we do not need a new Constitution, but we need a revolution, and particularly, a new "revolutionary spirit."         

Sincerely,

Steven Maloney

Whistleblower in the Tennessean

The Tennessean has a very good front page article on a local Navy whistle-blower, Lt. Jason Hudson.  Mr. Hudson is on the verge of being pushed out of the Navy because, according to The Tennessean,

The policy set a limit on the number of minorities admitted into the
Navy whose scores on a standardized test classified them as "lower
mental groups."

The article later notes that the Navy dragged out the legal battle over the issue, before finally concluding their position was "legally indefensible" (it’s moral status does not fare much better, I would imagine), and that Lt. Hudson has been messed with by the Navy.  If Lt. Hudson does get pushed out of the Navy, I hope that he lands on his feet.  Too often, entire lives are destroyed by blowing the whistle, and usually the issue of concern by the whistle blower goes largely unaddressed.   

The Death of Milton Friedman

As you probably know already, Milton Friedman has died.  Julian Sanchez, not surprisingly, comes to praise Friedman, I, however have come to bury him. 

I think that Friedman’s voice was very valuable to the public discussion, so I do not mean to insult when I say that I come to bury him.  Instead, I simply hope that in the "great" Keynes v. Friedman economic debate, we can now let the dead bury the dead.  Michael Sandel argues in Democracy’s Discontent that it was the turn to central economic planning, the type of which Keynes suggested, that started massively reconstituting political questions as subsumed inherently by economic ones.  While Friedman argues aggressively for what one might a call a "democratized" economic polity, the problem with both the views of Keynes and Friedman, in short, is that they prioritize the economy over the political to the point where political will is eclipsed almost entirely to serve there aggregative models.  While Friedman’s models are attractive on paper, it turns out that the real world finds them creating harsher realities that we might not find attractive do to the public choice dilemmas such radical free-marketeering creates.

Inside the context of some specific and limited policy projects, Friedman’s ideas are both insightful and practical as solutions.  But in terms of governing principle, we need to come to terms with the fact that there is no "there" there.  Hannah Arendt noted that rule by the market is literally "rule by nobody," and the idea that rule by nobody works can only be held by those people who are resourceful enough to make themselves powerful by whatever means they can pick up at their disposal.  Ultimately, politics is about much more than simply whether we should push money around the way Keynes suggests or the way Friedman suggests, or the way that someone else suggests.  Politics is, to paraphrase Leo Strauss (who was paraphrasing Aristotle) about everything.  And economics as political ideology surrenders man’s capacity to act to the cruel fate of process, against which man has an enormous capacity to rebel, and his individuality is dependent upon this rebellion.  In this regard, Keynes delivered the most insightful one-liner of the two, though he never fully grasped its import, when he said, "In the long run, everybody dies."