Dylan Matthews

Set that Crown on the Ground

(Cross-posted)

At this point, as the filibuster appears set to kill or gut the public option and perhaps sink cap-and-trade altogether, it seems more productive to map out how exactly one would go about changing it than to simply complain. The obvious antecedent for such a change is the 1975 effort to reduce the cloture vote requirement from two-thirds to three-fifths of those present. Thankfully, I just stumbled upon this great TIME article from the period describing the legislative maneuvering involved. As far as I can tell, there are two main lessons here:

Have the vice president on your side. Nelson Rockefeller repeatedly ruled on procedural matters in ways that favored reformers. This is also a good reminder that the Senate parliamentarian has no real power; he is merely an advisor to the presiding officer, in most cases the vice president. The VP can choose to ignore his advice whenever so desired.

Do it at the beginning of a Congress. The potential to claim that the initial rule-setting vote threshold of 50 votes still stands is far greater than once rules have been adopted, when it changes to 67 votes. Of course, if Joe Biden wanted to, he could rule that you can change the filibuster rule by simple majority now, without any real statutory support. But he doesn't seem to have the heart to do something that ballsy on behalf of all that is good and true in the world.

In any case, read the whole thing. Basically, what this means is that if Joe Biden and 51 Democrats wanted to, we could end the filibuster today. Or reduce the cloture requirement to 55. What needs to happen is a coalition pushing for total abolition, which can then claim 55 as a reasonable compromise for which 51 votes can be mustered. If we can get some gang of maximalists-maybe including noted hold opponent Ron Wyden and Europhile Bernie Sanders, among others-to start making 55 seem like a sensible middle ground, then the last vote needed on health care could be someone like non-filibusterer Mark Pryor, not Olympia Snowe or Blanche Lincoln.

The Promises You Meant to Carry Out Leave You Tasting Doubt

I agree with what Ygz, Spencer, and Rob say on the one-state solution as far as it goes. Obviously, a binational state would be an utter disaster and result in the relocation, most likely forced, of one or the other ethnic group between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. And I agree whole-heartedly with Spencer when he says that the real threat to Israel's continued existence comes from continued occupation of the West Bank, not Iran or some invisible army of Tony Judts coming to give Abu Mazen a seat in the Knesset.

My problem comes when we start making statements like this one of Matt's:

Readers will know that I’m not a big fan of nationalism and I am a big fan of trans-national projects like the European Union and the United Nations. And it’s even true that I really kind of hope that hundreds of years from now there won’t be national states at all, instead we’ll all be lumped in with the Vulcans and the Andorians in a United Federation of Planets and off we’ll go. But there’s clearly no prospects for the abolition of the nation-state in the short-term. And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim. Or, for that matter, as the Palestinian claim. By far the best way to secure a just resolution of those conflicting claims is through a two-state solution—an independent Palestine, and a democratic Jewish Israel.

There's something bizarre about a two-headed cosmopolitanism that accepts the end of the nation-state as its goal while backing all manner of nationalist claims in the short-run. And more to the point, the comparison to Finland and the Netherlands seems quite off base. This is a live issue for Israel in a way it simply isn't for, say, Finland. You don't hear Finnish politicians referring to the reproductive rates of ethnic minorities as a "demographic threat" and frantically planning ways to thin their ranks. I suppose if some of the Russians who stayed in Finland after the partition began reproducing at a clip that threatened to end ethnic Finns' hold on the country, one could say that the Finland will cease to exist as a Finnish state in some technical sense. That said, all cosmopolitans would condemn as racist calls for expelling Russo-Finns or for a redrawing of Finnish borders in order to make them Russian citizens again. Cosmpolitans would similarly condemn an argument that Russian refugees from the war should not have a right to return based not on the grounds that the historical moment is too far gone or that such relocation would be wholly impractical, but on the grounds that such a right would threaten Finland's Finnishness.

Yet these are precisely the conversations going on about Arabs, both (second-class) Israeli citizens and those suffering occupation. To be sure, one can dismiss the expulsionist rantings of Benny Morris and Avigdor Lieberman as representative of the extremes (though given Lieberman's current gig as foreign minister, the latter's a stretch). But even Matt endorses the notion that we should reject the right of return not on practical grounds but to "preserve its Jewish character". Unless one advances some form of Israeli exceptionalism, I can't see how this can be reconciled with what cosmopolitans like Matt and I believe about ethnicity and national identity. In any other society, this endorsement of policymaking based upon preserving an ethnic majority would be seen as completely repugnant. Because it is.

Dueling Headlines

Megan McArdle:

Health Care: What's the Big Rush?

Reuters:

No health coverage tied to 45,000 deaths a year

Seriously, why hurry?

Freedom of Action: A better conversation

(Cross-posted at The Hastings Center)

First of all, thanks to the Hastings Center for hosting this discussion, and for putting together such a thought-provoking set of essays. Connecting American Values with Health Reform brings up enough vital issues that I fear I will barely be able to scratch the surface in this space.

Let me start with Bruce Jennings’ fascinating opening essay on liberty. Given reform opponents’ frequent appeals to personal freedom both in specific cases–fears about government intrusion into end of life care, most notably–and in broader “the government is controlling your body” terms, establishing that health care reform is part and parcel of American ideals of freedom is absolutely essential, and so arguments like Jennings’ are absolutely critical to winning the debate.

That said, I fear Jennings is pursuing the wrong tack. I fear that buying into Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between positive and negative liberty is ultimately harmful both on this issue, and for advocates of progressive causes more generally. First off, the dichotomy is altogether too strict. As Cass Sunstein and Stephen Holmes argued in their The Cost of Rights, the negative rights we have are enabled by government protection, just as much as positive rights are. To pick the most obvious example, the negative right to property only exists in a world with police, firemen, and civil courts to protect that rights for individuals. Positive rights require more resources, perhaps, but this is a difference of degree, not of essence.

More to the point, a focus on positive liberty is essentially a focus on the least popular element of health reform, namely taxation. After all, the difference between positive and negative liberty in Berlin’s formulation is the necessity of tax dollars for the former, so defenses of positive liberty must necessarily be defenses of taxation. There is nothing wrong with this, of course; I have no problem with using tax dollars to reform the health care system, or indeed with raising taxes for that purpose if need be. However, in a nation with a long, distinguished history of tax revolts, this will be a difficult argument to win.

I would posit that a more productive conversation would focus on the gains health care reform would bring in terms of enabling greater freedom of action. A positive liberty conversation focuses on the costs health reform would exact due to financing issues, but a freedom of action conversation would focus on how American would have a greater ability to take risks, change jobs, and generally live freely without fear of medical bankruptcy or a similar calamity befalling them. The model here would be an exceptionally clever ad launched by Ron Wyden for his Wyden-Bennett health care bill. The ad emphasizes how health care reform would enable to change jobs without fear of losing their health care.

Of course, Wyden had a better bill to promote than the current watered-down legislation emanating from Max Baucus’ negotiations, but the principle is still one worth emphasizing. This approach recasts health care reform not as government intrusion in one’s health decisions, but as an end to insurance company and employer intrusion, and in doing so appeals to the traditional American ideal of self-reliance. That seems like a better debate to have than a head-on discussion of taxes, which is where a positive liberty debate would leave us.

Ivy League Legacies Are Privileged. News at 11.

This post of Emily's strikes as wrong in a number of ways. Let me go paragraph by paragraph:

[Kevin] Carey states as fact that “the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process.” I know, I know, there’s been bestseller after bestseller that has attempted to demonstrate the extent to which Ivy League admissions are unfair to the earnest but non-connected student who just can’t get into Harvard because s/he doesn’t know people in power. I’m sorry, but that’s just not the case. You have to meet a basic standard of academic competence to be admitted to Harvard. Or Princeton. Or any of their peer institutions. I know, I know, George W. Bush, but since about the late ’80s family connections have begun to be far less of a point on which college admissions turn.

This doesn't respond to Carey's point. He's not saying that there isn't a base standard for admission. Everyone knows there is. The problem is that most applicants meet that standard. A vast majority, in fact. William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's longtime admissions dean, pegs the number at 80-90 percent of applicants. So the legacies admitted are going to fall under that group. The question then is, of those qualified people, whether legacies get an unfair advantage in becoming among the ten percent of applicants admitted. The answer there is an unqualified yes. The acceptance rate for legacies in the class of 2011 was about 34-35 percent, far higher than the 9 percent overall acceptance rate that year. That these students--of whom, in the interest of full disclosure, I am one--get an big leg-up on the basis of something they can't control is pretty indisputable.

[A]lumni children are not de facto less qualified than other admits. In fact, if anything, they are likely to be a very academically well-qualified constituency: their parents received a very high-quality education. They probably went on to become middle-class, if they weren’t already. The children were probably raised with encouragement to academic pursuits. They probably had a certain number of environmental advantages.

Two things here. First, Emily's arguing against a straw man. No one is saying that equivalently qualified legacies should be at a disadvantage to non-legacies. What Carey, myself, and others want is an equal playing field, as opposed to the current system that explicitly privileges equivalently qualified legacies above non-legacies. Are alumni children not less qualified? Great, then let's prove it. If they can still get in without an extra boost, they'll have proven to be as qualified as their non-legacy peers. If not, then not. But let's base it on merit--or what passes for "merit" in the Ivy League admissions process--and not on some other factor that may or may not be correlated.

Secondly, I find Emily's suggestion that legacies should be entitled to get in on the basis of their families' superior education, their academically nourishing childhood, environmental advantages, etc. to be profoundly disturbing. Sure, this might make students more academically engaged, but it's also a factor wholly beyond their control. A student who becomes smart through these factors didn't "earn" anything. They just slipped into success on the basis of exogenous factors. That they should thus be privileged over, say, someone with working class parents who never went to college seems totally perverse to me.

You probably know that I’m the child of a Princeton alum. And I find the insinuation that I am less entitled to be here because my mother spent 10 years on this campus pretty insulting, frankly. I wouldn’t have lasted very long here if I couldn’t engage with my professors and my peers on a higher level, and I worked very hard both throughout high school and in the admissions process to get here. I find it very hard to believe that all this places me at some greater advantage, or suggests I’m less qualified to be here, than the kid whose parents also both have graduate degrees, but got them from different universities than mine did.

This, frankly, is what bothers me the most about Emily's post. It's not just that she repeats the straw man that anyone thinks legacies are "less" deserving of being admitted than non-legacies, rather than engaging with the real belief many hold that legacies should be placed on an equal footing. It's not even that Emily, in contradiction to the explicit admissions policy of Princeton and every other Ivy, finds it "very hard to believe" that she's at a greater advantage due to her status as a legacy. It's that her comparison isn't to the vast majority of high school students whose parents didn't finish college, let alone go to graduate school, it's to someone whose parents got graduate degrees at another school. The total lack of acknowledgment that the graduate education of Emily's--and my--parents places us at a huge advantage in all our educational pursuits due to no virtues of our own is jarring, to say the least. It's not normal to have parents who went to grad school. It's not normal, and we didn't earn it. We should at the very least be cognizant of that fact, and not take it as a given.

But Is It Good for The Aspies?

Loyal readers will remember a post I did back in April, when the trailer for Adam first came out, in which I was hopeful about its potential effect on public perceptions of Asperger's:

I'll reserve full judgment until I see the movie, but I'm cautiously optimistic that viewers will leave the theater thinking "Asperger's can be a blessing, not a curse" instead of "people with Asperger's are really weird."

Well, the movie has been in limited release for a few weeks now, and is opening wide today. I have a review up at the Prospect and, suffice it so say, I was disappointed:

For all his attention to detail, [writer-director Max] Mayer completely missed this larger, and more dangerous misrepresentation of Asperger's. Even a performance as nuanced as [Hugh] Dancy's and a script as careful as Mayer's cannot prevent the film from delivering a blunt message: Asperger's may not be all bad, but those with it are certainly not worth dating. Our social awkwardness, it suggests, is not a legitimate difference but an insurmountable obstacle to intimacy. Our occasional inability to express affection is equated with an inability to have affection. A woman in [Adam's girlfriend] Beth's position, beginning a relationship with a man with Asperger's but uncertain where it will lead, will leave the theater determined to break things off. Adam, then, is a funny little beast, a romantic comedy about Asperger's that leaves no room for romance in the lives of Aspies. Even as it gets our symptoms right, it does not appear to think we deserve love.

Read the rest here. I would add that, while I don't get into it in the review for obvious reasons, the film's ending only exacerbates this problem, making Adam more of a child, and his desire for love less worthy of reciprocation.

Taking Toffee With Your Vicodin

This, from Tom Schaller, seems unduly dismissive of the policy substance involved:

With all due respect to the late senator, I think it's a bad idea to suddenly change the law, even if the motives are to honor a long-serving senator and also to ensure that the state is not underrepresented in the Senate. Given that the current--and in my opinion, stupid--procedure was enacted by state Democrats with partisan motives to thwart then-Gov. Mitt Romney were he to have the power to appoint a successor in 2004 to John Kerry had Kerry won the presidential election, the calls for altering it again so soon after it was changed (and again with at least a partially partisan intent) would set, or rather continue, a dangerous precedent.

Tom's certainly right that both steps here - moving from a gubernatorial appointment until the next midterm or general election to a special election, and from a special election without an interim to a special election preceded by an interim appointment - are being / were taken for the most crass political reasons possible. And perhaps validating those motives sets a bad precedent.

But the end result is also the best policy. Special elections are more democratic than long-term interims, and special elections with a short-term interim allow states to not go unrepresented. There are some more regulations I'd add, such as Wyoming's requirement that the interim be from the same party as the incumbent, or a requirement that the interim not run in the special election. But the basic structure is better than the alternatives, enough so that the process through which it came to be does not particularly bother me.

In a way, it is somewhat fitting that Kennedy's passing resulted in this kind of policy improvement. His whole career was built around finding ways to exploit the political selfishness and cynicism of other actors and institutions to push through legislation that benefits a greater good. While that does not appear to be a conscious strategy in this case, it is the overall effect, and I'd like to think that Teddy would respect that.

In Nature of a Substitute

Let me just repeat my earlier support for Barney Frank if he chooses to seek Kennedy's seat. It would be a wonderful capstone for a tremendous career, and a huge step forward for America's LGBT community. The fact that people like Glenn Thrush are calling him "hard to oppose" is encouraging.

P.S. Scratch that - Frank is saying he's not interested. In that case, I'm a big Martha Coakley fan, Aqua Teen Hunger Force hilarity aside, and so I hope she runs and the eleven non-Frank Massachusetts House members will step aside to let her crush Mitt Romney, or whatever other sadsack the GOP puts up, more efficiently.

Ted Kennedy

The public perception of the Kennedy brothers has always puzzled me. Their level of public regard has always been in inverse proportion to the amount of good they have done for the world. Robert Kennedy comes the closest of them to being a secular saint, and yet beyond a mixed record on civil rights as Attorney General and a not particularly notable stint in the Senate, he left remarkably little behind him. John F. Kennedy is beloved with caveats, and while that whole "preventing the Eastern Seaboard from being nuked out of existence" thing was impressive, his slow progress on integration and welfare state expansion was disappointing, as, of course, were the Bay of Pigs and his steps toward escalation in Vietnam.

Ted Kennedy, however, gets labeled a drunken philanderer, despite having spent the past forty years pushing through every piece of progressive legislation that really mattered. The 1965 immigration reforms, the post-watergate campaign finance reforms, COBRA, ADA, Family and Medical Leave, SCHIP: you name it, he helped pass it. He almost single-handedly saved us from Associate Justice Robert Bork, was perhaps the first major national Democrat to support marriage equality, and had the balls to call for a nuclear freeze and oppose the invasion of Iraq when few others did. But, you know, there was that Chappaquiddick thing, so screw him.

This, suffice it to say, is bullshit. Kennedy had his personal demons. I lived underneath his freshman dorm room in Wigglesworth Hall last year, and the floorboards in his old common room are still loose from when he would hide his hard liquor under them. His alcoholism, womanizing, and, in at least one case, disregard for another human life were not particularly attractive qualities. But damned if he didn't do more to improve the lives of America's poor than anyone else in government. And damned if most of the too-few positive aspects of our nation's health care system can't be laid squarely at his feet.

This is not to say that Kennedy was politically blameless either. He should not have rejected Nixon's health care plan so brazenly (which he has acknowledged). He should not have challenged Carter in 1980. He definitely should not have supported Northern Irish secessionist terrorism with the vigor he did. But politics is an imperfect business. Compared to his colleagues, Kennedy's sins were minimal, and his accomplishments enormous. The lived experience of the American people has improved more due to his actions than due to those of any politician since Roosevelt. There is a lot I am willing to forgive for such a record, far more than needs to be forgiven of Teddy.

He wasn't the purest Kennedy, to be sure. He was not the president, and he was not the idealist. But he was the best Kennedy. He was the Kennedy who actually brought the country closer to one dreamed of in the rhetoric of his brothers, who made American liberalism implemented policy, rather than a pleasant dream. Some of this is due to longevity, of course, but it is mostly due to his very imperfection, to his willingness to wade into the mud, play dirty, cut deals, and staunch losses if it means some small progress. Senate maneuvering is an ugly business, but as Teddy showed like few others, it can a tool of the angels.

If there is any lesson to be drawn from his career to the current fight, to his final fight, it is that there is no shame in manipulating procedure, no shame in out-Roberts Rule-ing your opponent, if it means a better life for the American people. I harbor no illusions that Senate Republicans will have any desire to "pass it for Kennedy", but I hope that Senate Democrats will use the occasion to conclude, finally, that it need not matter what those forty bastards think. Expanding Medicare to 133%, and ensuring 20 million more Americans in the process, is worthy upsetting Senate niceties. Banning discrimination on preexisting conditions is worth making Chuck Grassley uncomfortable. And establishing an affordable market for individuals is worth jettisoning the silly "Gang of Six" concept altogether. Every Democrat in the Senate should be informed that voting against cloture on Kennedy's last bill is not just a shameful act of cowardice and perfidy, but cause for loss of committee memberships, of voting status within the caucus, and of DSCC support. Break skulls, Harry Reid. Break them for Teddy.

On the Non-Existence of Objectivist Historical Analysis

Matt and I have been responding to Will Wilkinson's rather silly post on the relative respectability of Marxism and Objectivism in academia on Twitter, so I thought I'd bring it here as well. Attempts to shut down Marxist writing through repeated shouts of "Kulaks!" are juvenile and a clear indication that the person in question has never actually read Marx, and Matt does a typically excellent job of showing that Marxism has, indeed, produced great scholarship through people like Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson.

That said, Wilkinson's comment on Matt's post deserves further examination:

Perhaps Hobsbawm, Thompson, etc. were smart imaginative people and would have made even more useful contributions outside a Marxian framework. My guess is that, body counts aside, Marxism led to a huge amount of intellectual wasted effort and had an overall retarding effect on intellectual progress. I’m not sure how to argue this (maybe the possible world in which Marx never caught on gets hijacked by an even more fruitless ideology), but the combination of the endurance and falsity of the core Marxist tenets seem to me likely to have had a rather massive downside.

Yeah, no. Obviously, not all of Marx's ideas hold up. The labor theory of value isn't exactly riding high these days. But a lot - I'd say more - still have relevance. Marxist alienation is a tremendously useful tool for studying work and workers, and the applicability of commodity fetishism today should be clear enough. I even think Marx's theory of history has a lot going for it, an argument into which the late G.A. Cohen put a lot of intellectual muscle. I'm not up enough on his exploitation theory, but it has serious people defending it.

Two broader points can be drawn from this. First, Marx is divisible. A historian or social theorist can draw upon certain parts of his critique of capitalism without agreeing with all of Capital, let alone with Marx's political program. For example, I wrote an essay for a sociology of work class last spring drawing upon Marx's theory of alienation in order to analyze drive-through window workers at McDonald's franchises. This does not - or at least should not - imply that I accept every theory the man has promulgated. It does mean that I dubbed one of them to have value, and used it as a way to critique low-wage labor conditions. The paper was certainly Marxist in character, but that doesn't make me a Marxist, let alone a Communist.

Second, Marx's primary intellectual value is as critic, not as a promulgator of particular policy planks. One needs not draw the same normative conclusions about the need to overthrow capitalism in its entirety as Marx to agree that capitalism is a deeply flawed system and that he had some decent criticisms of it. When E.P. Thompson uses Marx to analyze the development of the English working classes, that need not imply support for Communist nations or policies, but that Marx has interesting and useful things to say about class relations (which should be an uncontroversial point). Of course, Thompson, Hobsbawm, and others did belong to the Communist Party of Great Britain while using Marxist analysis, but while connected, their political activism was not inextricably linked with their academic work. It is completely possible - and indeed ideal - to use Marxist analysis while rejecting his political platform.

Neither of these two points hold for Rand. Her theory does not have unique components that do not turn up in other places. Its metaphysical claims - that there is independently existing reality that is knowable through logic and reason - have been made by many others before and since. Her real innovation was putting a philosophical sheen on her knee-jerk hatred for basic human decency. That's not really a critique, or at least a sophisticated one from which interesting claims can be made. A historical analysis through an Objectivist lens would be cartoonishly simple, and not particularly interesting. As people like Thompson and Hobsbawm have proved, nothing could be further from the truth with Marxist analysis.

Wilkinson's claim seems to be that Thompson and Hobsbawm would have been equally good historians without Marx's assistance. But to make that argument, he needs to prove that Marx's assistance was not really worth much. When even vocal critics like Jon Elster concede that there is real value in his work on alienation, exploitation, and class conflict, that's a hard point to establish.

P.S. See also new TNR webtern Noah Kristula-Green's take.