Matthew Yglesias

Nuke Mania

Kevin Drum wants to know how we liberal nuke-o-philes plan to win public support for our side. It's like anything else, you need a well-funded corporate lobby to hire Frank Luntz. Since I believe Francophilic America-hating Democrats will soon be in office, we can easily get EDF (which I believe is no longer calling itself Electricité de France for international marketing purposes) to chip in. Alternatively, someone could write a prominently placed article in America's leading liberal magazine....

Question of My Own

I'm always interested in the ambiguities and disagreements that exist within broadly "left" politics. I think the key issue here concerns inequality. In other words, is the goal to make the poor richer, or is the goal to decrease the gap between rich and poor? Obviously, these goals might overlap to some extent, but they're clearly not the same thing. What you think about this question should have a big impact on your assessment of the past thirty years of American history. I cast my lot in with the make the poor richer side of the argument.

Survey

Good questions. My answers:

Pulling Out...Of Germany

When the Bush administration takes an action (drawing down force levels in Europe) that meets with approval from Tapped and Hit and Run one knows that something either very right or very wrong is going on. I would put myself down for the very right point of view. I've read a number of accounts over the years of why American troops need to stay in Europe but they strike me as deeply absurd. The notion is that without a large American deployment over there, European military rivalries will resurface and the long postwar era of peace and integration will somehow come to an end. Now I can't prove this won't happen, but as I say it's absurd.

Now America should certainly remain engaged in Europe, through the NATO guarantee, participation in our current commitments to the Balkans, and by keeping some bases (along with some kind of staff) which might prove useful in various contingenies, but there's simply know need for the American Army to be the main European defense force, especially seeing as there's not even anything to defend Europe against. Russia has one must recall, roughly the GDP of Denmark and no capacity to project power.

More broadly, the thing that needs to happen as we enter the 21st century is to make the community of liberal democracies stronger by, on the one hand, getting America's allies to step up their levels of commitment to defense, and on the other hand getting America to cooperate more thoroughly with said allies. The Coldwar is over -- and good riddance. It's time for a more mature, more cooperative, more egalitarian approach to global security and this is a good first step in that direction.

Polarization

Good points from David Brooks. It would be one thing, and not really a bad thing in my opinion, if the American people were divided between two fairly distinct normative views about politics. The reality, however, is that Americans are increasingly divided between two different factual pictures of the world, which is a fairly disturbing turn of events. Part of the tragedy of it is that it always seems to me that when you get people to talk quietly in small groups, America isn't really all that polarized. People disagree, to be sure, but they don't disagree by forming two consistent opinion-clusters with a large gap between them -- there's just a bunch of people with a range of views about various things.

The Words of George W. Bush

Ted at Diachronic Agency parses some Bushian remarks, with amusing results. It's too bad, I think, that the president commits little verbal gaffes so often. Those are easy to seize on and mock, but it's also easy enough to understand that lots of people get tongue-tied sometimes, and that if the president does this more often than most people, that's perhaps amusing, but not especially relevant. Since that bit of conventional wisdom has worked its way into the national psyche, it's now very hard to draw people's attention to the instances of much deeper rhetorical incoherence into which the president slips.

This Is What I'm Saying

Juan Cole has a column pointing out that the toppling of Saddam Hussein, an ineffectual pseudo-supporter of Palestinian rights, and replacing him with a chaotic situation in which radical militias will roam free, has not exactly been a good deal for Israeli security. Quite so. It's almost as if, rather than serving Israeli interests as many have charged, the Bush administration is determined to serve Iranian hardliners.

Now to be clear, I don't really think that George W. Bush is a pawn of Iranian intelligence. It is noteable, however, that the upshot of his policymaking has been to seriously weaken the strategic position of the United States and its allies, while allowing serious security threat to grow all the more ominous. This is likely an "honest mistake" of some sort, but a rather serious one.

Democratic Abortion Intolerance

Tom Smith guest posting at the Volokh Conspiracy states the following bit of conventional wisdom:

The interesting thing is that it is just assumed that to be a good Democrat, you have to support abortion, and not only abortion, but even the forms of it very few doctors will touch with a referral, let alone perform, that is, the killing of infants who could survive in a neo-natal ICU. When it comes to its infallible teaching on abortion, the Democratic Party is more than willing to exercise its power of excommunication and anathema for heretics and apostates. "I'm a good Democrat, but I'm against abortion" are the words of a Democrat not long for her party. And this hypothetical person would be drummed out, to switch metaphors, for what? For being intolerant, of course.

If you look around, though, there are many pro-life Democratic officeholders and quite a lot of Democratic candidates for office. As with pro-choice Republicans, the pro-life Democrats tend to come from regions of the country where the Democratic Party is somewhat marginal, so most Democrats are pro-choice. Nevertheless, it's a little known fact that Harry Reid of Nevada, the number two Democrat in the Senate, is a pro-life Mormon. By contrast, there are no pro-choice Republicans in anything even remotely resembling a leadership post.

Our Fragile Democracy

David Adesnik responds to suggestions that what's so bad about Bush is that he lives at a time when "bad decisions could imperil our democracy" by suggesting that all presidents live at such times. I would make a slightly different point, namely that before the mid-sixties or so the United States wasn't operating under a political system that anyone would consider "democracy" if some regime tried it out today.

I think a lot of progressives spend a lot more time being pessimistic about the present, the near past, and the near future than they should. The problem isn't so much that progressives are wrong in their estimation of George W. Bush (he is a bad president) but that they're remarkably blind to just how bad things have been in the past. Ezra Klein once called me a "cynical optimist" and I think that's just right -- once you lose your illusions about the past, you'll see that live in George Bush's America is pretty darn good, compared to the historical alternatives.

Another way of putting this is that a lot of people confuse the pace and direction of change with the actual merits of the situation. The New Deal, clearly, was the high tide of progressive politics in the sense that lots of progressive steps were being taken, but America in 2004 is a far, far, far juster society than was America in 1938 or 1967 or other moments of greater progressive change. Bush has done bad things, but we've hardly been plunged into the dark ages here and a few positive things have even been done. Someday -- maybe in less than a year, maybe in a bit less than five years -- he'll be out of power and more serious progress will resume.

More Nukes

Mark Kleiman has more on the case for nuclear power. It's also worth noting, as Mark does, that George W. Bush took the rare step of doing the right thing and overriding the NIMBY concerns of the good people of Nevada with regard to waste disposal. Obviously, I'm hoping he loses the election, but if that happens because Kerry wins the Gore states plus Nevada it's going to leave a rather sour taste in my mouth. Which is not to say that a Kerry win in Nevada would be unwelcome, but I really hope it would be complemented by Ohio, Missouri, Arizona, or some such.

Pin The Blame on Bill Clinton

Fred Schoeneman figures it out:

Who is responsible for creating this climate before Defense became Chalabi's patron? Remember, before he was defense's boy, he was state's and before he was state's boy, he was CIA's. Under Clinton.

Corn vs. Ledeen

I thought David Corn might use this at his own new blog, but he hasn't so far, so I'll steal it. We were both down at AEI yesterday afternoon to see Stephen Hayes discuss his new book The Connection on a panel with well-respected terrorism experts Michael Ledeen and James Woolsey along with paranoid lunatic and suspected Iranian spy Peter Bergen. After the panelists were done talking, things proceeded to a Q&A;, so Corn took the opportunity to start asking something about how, in light of recent revelations about Ahmad Chalabi, we could be so sure about --

-- and then, like that, moderator Ledeen, looking mighty distressed, cuts Corn off and basically ensures that the panelists all ignore what he said. Good times in neocon land.

"Politics"

Sara Butler writes a critique I've seen a couple of other places:

There is a second level of this kind of response, which goes something like, "Men and women are just generally interested in writing and reading about different things, so it's nobody's fault that women aren't well represented among political blogs." The problem with that, which I spent a lot of time on in my paper, is the definition of "political" that it assumes. For example, the study that everyone was talking about a little big ago which purported to show that women make up only 4% of political bloggers defined political blogs as "sites devoted to politics, current events, foreign policy, and various ongoing wars." Surely people can see why this definition is problematic? Does my blog, for example, count as "political" under this definition? Do many of the woman-authored blogs over on my blogroll count? Shouldn't they? If our definition of "political" already excludes women in some way from the get go, maybe there's a problem with our definition. Or maybe we should, at the very least, just be aware that categories like "political" aren't necessarily gender-neutral. So when people say, "I'm just interested in the ideas, I don't care about who is writing them," the fact is that gender is already to some extent built into which ideas you're interested in.

The Pope

What's the deal with non-Catholic leaders holding these respectful meetings with the Pope. I mean, as I see it, there are roughly two possibilities on the table here. Maybe the Pope really is the head of the One True Church outside of which no salvation is possible. If you believe that, then clearly you ought to treat the man with a great deal of respect. But then again, if you believe that, then you really ought to join his church. If you don't believe that -- because you're an atheist, Protestant, Jew, what have you -- then the Pope is kind of just an eccentric old man surrounded by strangely deluded toadies.

Anything for votes, I guess. But really, to sit around and listen to the Pope critiquing your foreign policy is just absurd, and it doesn't get any less absurd just because your foreign policy is terrible.

Stab In The Back

Nobody's trying to perpetuate anything like that old saw:

We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.

Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on our screens and speak up when a dozen err or die. And, in the latter case, our concern is not out of respect for their sacrifice but more likely a protest against what we don't like done in our name. So ABC's Nightline reads the names of the fallen from Iraq, but not those from the less controversial Afghanistan, because ideological purity -- not remembering the departed per se -- is once again the real aim.

The craziest thing about this line of commentary from The National Review crowd, though, is precisely that they're not the neoconservatives who provided the vision for this war. They're just expounding a kind of knee-jerk hawkery, it's our country, our president, godamnit, and we're conservative so let's support brutal measures and get mad at the liberal media. But what's the point here supposed to be? What are we trying to achieve that's going to be consistent with this sort of attitude? It's just war for war's sake at this point, nothing here about poltical goals, nation-building, how to accomplish anything, or really any sustantive commentary on anything at all.

Anniversaries

Last night CNN International did back-to-back commemoration stories, one on Tianamen Square and one on the Normandy Landing. It was pretty heartbreaking. We've been seeing a lot of stories lately about the courage and sacrifice of the Allied soldiers during the second world war, and it would be a wonderful thing if it turned out that their good character and the nobility of their cause was the reason they won the war, but as Tianamen reminds us, no such thing is true. The good guys -- even when they don't lack in courage, fortitude, or integrity don't always win.

And it changes the way you think about 1989 in Eastern Europe. For all the courage and heroism of Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa and the like, they didn't succeed where the Chinese dissidents failed because they were better, they succeeded because Asian Communism was willing to do was Slavic Communism was not -- shoot unarmed demonstrators, crush people with tanks, etc.

Making it all somewhat more troubling, one would like to really hate the current government of the PRC for what they did. And yet, the intervening fifteen years of strong Chinese economic growth have been one of the great moral success stories of human history. Repressive as the current Chinese state is, today's Chinese probably enjoy more freedom than their ancestors did for any significant period of time. Would a democratic China have done just as well? It very well might have, but then again it might not.