About a year ago, Will Wilkinson had a post about a similar video that celebrated an “I only sleep with Democrats” theme.   Wilkinson’s objections centered around the way that the video “simultaneously reduces politics to fashion and elevates fashion to morality” and the disagreeable notion that female sexuality was some prize that ought to be doled out to those males who tow the right line.  As one commenter put it:

The point is that 1) it views politics as a matter of tribal affiliation, 2) that women’s bodies and sexuality are viewed as a resource at the disposal of the tribe, to be used as a prize to keep the coalition together. These are fundamentally illiberal, anti-feminist ideas.

This is part of my objection, but it is really just the beginning.  It is “fundamentally illiberal” to ask individuals to put their own personal choices and preferences at the disposal of the group, but much of what falls under contemporary Progressive thought is illiberal- and I mean liberal in the classical Enlightenment sense.  The nature of liberty is such that people are free to dispose of it as they will.  If people wish to subsume their own identities into some larger social project, then so be it.  We all do it to some extent. 

So why did I have such an extreme reaction to this Rock the Vote video?  Why did it immediately get visions of some totalitarian, boot-smashing future running through my head?  It mostly has to do with this phrase, “politics is personal”, a reworking of the feminist credo, ”the personal is political.” 

Let’s take a look at that whole quote that I excerpted in the title.  It’s from 1984 and it begins like this:

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.

When you begin to inject politics into sexual relationships, you are quite literally emmeshing politics into the ties that bind people together.  If totalitarianism comes to us, it will most likely not come in the form of an invading army or even through a violent revolution.  It will come from an ever-creeping ideology of “personal politics.”  It will come as people begin more and more to replace their own personal tastes, wants, desires with those of the group.  Political power will become replaced by aesthetic power, the ability to dictate what is acceptable and what is not.  What happens then?  The answer comes in another quote from 1984:

Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

Again, is this extreme?  Yes, but that is the point.  The idea that you should only sleep with someone who agrees with you about health care or about which way to vote is an extreme idea.  It is unfortunate that so many people do not see this.

In the course of the article, however, Balko says this:

Liberals put a premium on equality. Not equality under the law (as noted above by their general support for the aggressive prosecution of white collar criminals), but equality of wealth and status.

and it strikes me as only half right.  Liberals tend to be in favor greater equality when it comes to wealth, but greater hierarchy when it comes to status.  In fact, I would say that this is why many liberals have an anti-market bias: markets tend to link status to wealth.

In the criminal justice context, this explains liberal attitudes towards things like hate crimes and affirmative action.  They create special and protected classes of people and actions.  This is a hierarchy that can be centrally controlled by bureaucrats and intellectuals rather than be evaluated on an individual basis by a decentralized legal system.

There is also the difference between a broadly utilitarian ethics on the left and a consequentialist ethics on the right, at least where criminal justice issues are concerned.  Liberals tend to be willing to take much greater liberties with regards to the process so long as it grants the outcome they want, even to the point where that process shows a disregard for individual rights.  Conservatives are often so invested in their individualist ethos that they refuse to acknowledge any systemic role in the path that individuals take.  For these reasons I do agree with Balko’s main point, that liberals are unlikely to abandon their fondness for things like hate crime legislation and conservatives are unlikely to abandon their ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ mentality.  This is unfortunate, because reforming or justice system would likely pay great dividends.

The only thing I might add, and this is something I do plan to write more on in the future, is that contemporary feminism is often more about giving women a leg up than it is about real equality.  This is unfortunate.  A society that systemattically oppresses half of its population can be neither just nor will it ever reach its full development potential.  Equality between the sexes is important; too important to be left to the feminists.

This isn’t protectionism; we’re enforcing the law,” Mr. Gerard said. “We’re trying to defend our members’ job security. In order to do that in this kind of a global economy, we need to police imports and trade law.”

Not being glib, but perhaps someone ought to get Mr. Gerard a dictionary.  A quick glance at the Wikipedia entry on protectionism offers this:

Protectionism is the economic policy of restraining trade between states, through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, restrictive quotas, and a variety of other restrictive government regulations designed to discourage imports, and prevent foreign take-over of local markets and companies. This policy is closely aligned with anti-globalization, and contrasts with free trade, where government barriers to trade are kept to a minimum. The term is mostly used in the context of economics, where protectionism refers to policies or doctrines which “protect” businesses and workers within a country by restricting or regulating trade with foreign nations.

 I’m just sayin’ …

Despite the instinctive appeal of distributing laptops to schoolchildren, there is precious little evidence that making computers available to children improves educational outcomes. The circumstantial evidence that exists certainly doesn’t buttress the one-laptop-per-child approach.

When I first heard about OLPC I thought it was a pretty cool idea.  The more I learned about it; however, the more I realized that I was right: it is a “pretty cool” idea.  Unfortunately, pretty cool doesn’t always make the grade.

A hundred dollar laptop sounds like something that has real value to us; we, therefore, reason that it must have real universal value.  And, of course, it does have real universal value; just maybe not as much value as a cell phone or any number of other very basic interventions that are not nearly as cool.

(H/T to Marginal Revolution)

Preston Brooks

On May 22, 1856, Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner with his Gutta-percha wood walking cane in the Senate chamber because of a speech Sumner had made three days earlier, criticizing President Franklin Pierce and Southerners who sympathized with the pro-slavery violence in Kansas (“Bleeding Kansas“).

At first intending to challenge Sumner to a duel, Brooks consulted with fellow South Carolina Rep. Laurence M. Keitt on dueling etiquette. Keitt instructed him that dueling was for gentlemen of equal social standing, and suggested that Sumner occupied a lower social status comparable to a drunkard due to the supposedly coarse language he had used during his speech. Brooks thus decided to attack Sumner with a cane.

All that being said, health care legislation will either pass, or it will not pass.  I have nothing more enlightened to say on that topic.  I do want to say a few things about the speech as a speech.  Whenever I hear Obama speak, I am usually reminded as to why I am not a progressive.  Those reasons always have to do with a legitimate disagreement about specific policy options, but they also have to do with some not so specific disagreements in world view.  I have picked out a few quotes to illustrate what I mean:

I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.

Does Obama really believe that he can be the last President to take up the cause of health insurance?  Progressives often like to think of society as some string of static problems that can be “fixed”.  Unfortunately, the world does not really work that way.

We are the only advanced democracy on Earth – the only wealthy nation – that allows such hardships for millions of its people.

This is one of my favorites: the “why can’t we be like those enlightened Europeans?” argument.  I am sure three were people who made this same argument at the founding of our democracy as we contemplated government without a heriditary monarchy or a permanent class of aristocrats to keep the rabble in line.  There are any number of reasons why we are not like Denmark, and the conversation about whether we should or should not try to change that is a long and complex one.  It is a shame that conversation often gets boiled down to “they have it.  why can’t we?”

Well the time for bickering is over. The time for games has passed. Now is the season for action.

This is perhaps the most infuriating thing about the Obama administration; the way they dismiss opposing viewpoints with a handwave and a reference to “silly stuff” or “games”. 

There are those presidents who, by virtue of their leadership in particularly trying times, earned the weight and some claim to moral authority that might make such language bearable.   George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR come to mind.  Obama does not.  I have every confidence that we can expect four-to-eight years of very competent and able governance, but that alone should not elevate Obama to the role of “Great White Father” in Washington.

Health care is the perfect illustration to how this split works.  The radicals are the ones out demonstrating.  They are holding the signs that say things like, “We Demand a Single Payer Plan Now.”  They are the ones facing off against their conservative counterparts, who are holding sings that say things like, “Get the Government Out of Health Care.”  The mainstream liberals,  on the other hand, do not seem to know what to make of all the protestations coming from the right; after all, ‘we can all agree that our health care system is broken.  And national health systems works so well in Denmark and Sweden.’

As a thought experiment imagine a country in which the mainstream liberal point of view came to dominate in much the same way the Communist Party dominates in China.  This is not a state characterized by brutal oppression of the opposition, but rather a polite refusal to listen to most of what the opposition has to say. Now imagine that a sate run newspaper in our imaginary country ran a story about dissent on some government initiative.  Would that story be at all different from this story about conservative health care protests?

Look at this excerpt:

But most of those who spoke Tuesday seemed unlikely to vote in the Democratic primary. Many seemed concerned about issues that are either not in the health care legislation or are peripheral to the debate in Washington — abortion, euthanasia, coverage of immigrants, privacy.

“It says plainly right there they want to limit the type of care elderly can get,” said Laurel Tobias, an office manager from Lebanon, referring to a bill in the House. “They are talking about killing people.”

Notice how this puts the onus on a private citizen to say something relevant to what happens in Washington rather than asking why what happens in Washington isn’t relevant to what concerns this woman.  It may be perfectly reasonable to dismiss someone as “peripheral to the debate” when they are accusing the government of “talking about killing people”.  It is also perfectly reasonable for someone to question whether a government plan will have unintended consequences.  And anyway, how do we know that the current health care bill doesn’t deal with any of these issues?  Has anyone actually read the entire bill?

The world needs a coordinated response in which each country commits to undertake stimulus that’s appropriate to the size of its economy and to its position in the global balance of trade. Further, we need a serious international commitment toward rebalancing in the medium-term — to a weaker dollar, less U.S. consumption, more American exports, and less foreign economic dependence on the U.S. consumer market as an employment strategy.

So, Americans need to stop buying stuff they may not need from China, while China continues to plunge their savings into American debt instruments…  that would indeed be an interesting bit of “coordination”.

Also, what if all this spending doesn’t bring the promised stimulus?  It’s entirely possible that many Americans can make it six months or a year without making too many major purchases.  If that happens, then where does all this new found liquidity end up?  Does it go right back into the bond market?  Are we ‘priming the pump’ of the real economy, or are we just setting ourselves up for a whole lot of future inflation.

I really wish I were smart enough to make heads or tails out of this.

For liberals, “stimulus spending” is a classification that no longer classifies: All spending is, they are certain, necessarily stimulative.

George Will usually produces very good sentences.  Read the whole column in today’s WaPo.

It seems that Jonathan Chait agree with him:

The point of stimulus spending, by contrast, is simply to spend money–on something useful if possible, wasteful if necessary. Keynes proposed burying money in mineshafts, so that workers would be hired to dig it out. (Imagine what the GOP could do with material like that.)

These two sentences seem to get right at the heart of this stimulus debate.  The lead us to ask: Will having the government spend a lot of money very quickly boost our economy in the way that Keynsian theory predicts it will or won’t it? Liberals tend to like government spending, so it’s quite convenient for them to answer ‘yes, it will’; conservatives tend not to like increased government spending, so it’s quite easy for them to say ‘no, it won’t’.  Who do you listen to when everyone seems to have a dog in the fight?

This is a situation where it’s very instructive to find those people who are swimming against the tide:  liberals who are wary of the stimulus and fiscal conservatives who support it.  Alice Rivlin seems to fit that category, but who else?