Matt Yglesias

What Might Have Been

Looking back over a decade that was pretty great for China, India, much of Eastern and Central Europe, Brazil, and some parts of Africa but bad for the United States, it really is sobering to reflect on how contingent it all was.

As you know, I’m a firm believer in the idea that election results are dominated by the fundamentals. But you do have exceptions, and the United States Presidential election of 2000 was clearly one of them. Which is to say that the outcome was so close that it easily could have gone the other way without any titanic world-historical events having been different. The Palm Beach County ballot could have been designed differently. A small number of Ralph Nader voters could have flinched at the last minute and pulled the lever for Gore. And more broadly very small differences in campaign tactics very plausibly might have altered this one. And I think American politics and public policy would have taken a very different—and much better—course.

I know some progressives try to comfort themselves with the thought that had 9/11 gone down under Gore’s watch, the ensuing right-wing savaging would have killed him. But I really think that’s a big mistake. The rally ’round the flag effect would have been smaller than what you saw for Bush, but still real and substantial, and the strength of the rabid right would have preventing the GOP from ducking effectively. Democrats not only probably would have made congressional gains in the 2002 midterms, but the temporary post-9/11 spike in public confidence in government would have created a much more promising environment for progressive policies than the one you see today.

Mystery of the Decade

Here’s something I’m not sure we’ll ever really understand, but I wonder in a nagging way why it is that the Bush administration decided to take the line that all its illegally interrogation techniques weren’t really torture, or weren’t really illegal. Why not do the reverse? Why not admit, straight up, that past laws and treaties adopted by the United States of America sharply constrained the nation’s ability to deploy brutal interrogations and demand that congress change the rules? All evidence is that torture remained fairly popular long past the point when George W Bush himself had become unpopular. And that was even without any prominent political figures actually saying the words “torturing suspects should be legal.”

If Bush had said in the winter of 2001-2002 that he wanted congress to repudiate the Geneva Conventions as outdated in an era of terrorism, does anyone seriously think that the Senate Democrats would have stood in his way? Back then you had highbrow magazines like The Atlantic arguing that “what’s needed is a little smacky-face.” It would have been a great wedge issue for Bush, reflected a policy course that they intended to pursue anyway, and would have spared them a lot of problems down the road.

Did they just prefer the idea of breaking the law to changing it? Did they know on some level that they were in the wrong and didn’t want to own their own actions? It’s weird.

Very Rare Terrorists Are Very Hard to Find

Spencer Ackerman tries to problematize the conclusion that the underpants bomber incident really represents a grievous intelligence failure. You should read his whole analysis. But in brief, while by definition letting a bomber on an airplane is a failure, based on what was actually known about Abdulmutallab, excluding him from flying would involve erecting pretty substantial barriers to entering the United States in ways that would have real costs. As I said before, the key point about identifying al-Qaeda operatives is that there are extremely few al-Qaeda operatives so (by Bayes’ theorem) any method you employ of identifying al-Qaeda operatives is going to mostly reveal false positives.

Read, for example, this account of looking retrospectively at Abdulmutallab’s time in London. The fact of the matter is that there’s nothing in his behavior during this period that distinguishes him from any number of other young, reasonably devout Muslims living in Britain. He had political opinions that are outside the mainstream for a white Christian living in the United States, but so do virtually all Muslims.

John Burns is a great reporter, but I think this graf in the piece is analytically suspect:

That view, if confirmed, would offer a stark reaffirmation that Britain, the United States’ closest ally, continues to pose a major threat to American security. Critics in Britain and the United States say the British security forces, despite major increases in budgets and manpower in recent years, have not yet succeeded in adequately monitoring, much less restraining, the Islamic militancy that thrives in the vast network of mosques that serve the nation’s 1.5 million Muslims — and on university campuses across the country where nearly 100,000 of the 500,000 students are Muslims, including many, like Mr. Abdulmutallab, from overseas.

It’s just not the case that the possibility of a guy going to the UK, becoming radicalized, going to Yemen, acquiring an idea about how to smuggle explosives onto a plane, boarding a plane in Amsterdam, and attempting to detonate the device constitutes a “major threat to American security.” You don’t want to minimize the threat that a couple of hundred people might get murdered. We punish—severely and rightly—individuals who knowingly murder as few as one person. Murdering a whole plane full of people is very bad and we should try hard to stop it from happening. But the detonation of a plane just isn’t a major threat to our security. Civilian planes have been destroyed before, they’ve crashed before, and the country has suffered a much worse terrorist attack and in a broad sense it’s always turned out okay.

The other point is that monitoring the UK’s 1.5 million Muslims is a lost cause. If you have a 99.9 percent accurate method of telling whether or not a given British Muslim is a dangerous terrorist, then apply it to all 1.5 million British Muslims, you’re going to find 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. But nobody thinks there are anything like 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. I’d be very surprised if there were as many as 15. And if there are 15, that means you’re 99.9 percent accurate method is going to get you a suspect pool that’s overwhelmingly composed of innocent people. The weakness of al-Qaeda’s movement, and the very tiny pool of operatives it can draw from, makes it essentially impossible to come up with viable methods for identifying those operatives.

Comic Book Adaptation of the Decade

We had a lot of comic book adaptions in the zeros, and the best of them, contrary to what you might have heard, is Iron Man. I promise you that this is a better movie than The Dark Knight. Go back and watch them again if you don’t believe me. I’m not sure what’s led people to get confused about this—I think maybe people have decided that the use of a darker color pallet makes Dark Knight more serious, which is itself a lot sillier than using bright colors in your comic book adaptation. Dark Knight isn’t even as good as Batman Begins!

Let me just emphasize that in my view you really need to rewatch mainstream hit movies to form sound opinions about them. This is stuff that’s meant to be replayed on cable until the End Times. To just stay within the intra-Batman comparisons, once you already know what’s going to happen the tension totally drains away from the ferry-bomb stuff. By contrast knowing the Ra’s al-Ghul reveal makes the earlier training scenes cooler, it doesn’t ruin them.

I spent the decade as a real comic book adaptation completist, so I can tell you with some confidence that Daredevil and Elektra are the two worst of the decade. Considerably worse than the awful Fantastic Four 2. But which is the very worst? I think that to give a fair answer I would need to rewatch them but that’s a fate too horrible to contemplate.

Actor of the Decade

The actor of the decade is George Clooney. He’s got five great movies—Fantastic Mr Fox, Up in the Air, Michael Clayton, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Ocean’s 11—plus a number of others (O Brother, Burn After Reading, Ocean’s 12, Good Night and Good Luck) that have merit. And the others aren’t necessarily unwatchable either. We’re a long way from the time he saved that kid trapped in a sewer.

TV Show of the Decade

Obviously the TV show of the decade is The Wire. I’ve already seen seasons one and two thrice, season three four times, and season four twice (just once for season five) and the fact of the matter is that you could spend a lot of time rewatching this stuff. The Sopranos is also extremely good, but has a bunch of weak patches. TV produced some other shining moments this decade, but they tended to be somewhat fleeting, like season one of Veronica Mars.

Band of the Decade

Suppose I wasn’t trapped on a desert island at all, but for some reason I would never again be allowed to listen to an album released between 2000 and 2009. Except for one band! So who do I make the exception for?

By that standard, I think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are my band of the oughts. Three albums and two EPs, all excellent, and a sound that evolves all the time while staying somehow essentially Yeah Yeah Yeahish.

Russia vs the Asteroids

Here’s a weird story. Russia says it needs to save the world from an asteroid collision:

Anatoly Perminov told Golos Rossii radio the space agency would hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis. He said his agency might eventually invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project.

But Western sources say they’ve checked this out and there’s nothing to worry about:

NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid’s path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000.

NASA said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact.

I certainly hope to see more cooperation between major countries on this sort of issue in the future. Nations seeking to demonstrate their greatness through robust space programs is much better for the world than nations seeking to demonstrate their greatness by building large nuclear arsenals. And working on monitoring asteroids and other possible collisions is a much better use of space budgets than a manned mission to Mars or space-based weapons.

The News Business’ Crisis of Productivity

Two images both via Andrew Golis. First, plummeting employment in newspapers:

Second, after a period in which TV-watching was cutting into people’s reading, words are back largely thanks to the Internet:

A large-scale study by the University of California at San Diego and other research universities revealed what some of us have long suspected: We’re reading far more words than we used to as we adopt new technologies.

“Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet,” found a University of California at San Diego study (.pdf) published this month by Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short of the University of San Diego.

The second trend is why the outlook for producers of written words is so very bleak. You hear a lot of talk about different kinds of ideas to bolster revenue models or get people to read more. But the reality is that the web makes it easier than ever for someone inclined to read things to read them. With global distribution, the same quantity of readers can be supplied by many, many, many, many fewer writers and editors. America produces far more manufactured goods than it did 40 years ago, even as employment in the manufacturing sector has collapsed. News writing seems to be going the same way for similar reasons. The increased productivity is very bad for people counting on jobs in the sector.

Rationality and Efficiency

Lots of people have already pointed out all the flaws in Ted Gayer’s absurd argument that it’s impossible for money-saving energy efficiency measures to exist because for them to exist would violate “the basic principles of economics.”

One thing I did want to say, though, is that I don’t like it when people who point out that the world doesn’t work this way lean too heavily on the idea that Gayer is failing to recognize that people aren’t always rational. I think the right way to make the critique is precisely that Gayer is failing to recognize that people are rational. Rational people recognize that they have limited monetary resources but also limited time. In wealthy societies such as our own, people regularly expend extra funds in order to save time. We buy, for example, washer/drier setups rather than saving money by doing the laundry by hand. The process by which a consumer costs himself money, but saves time, by failing to thoroughly research the tradeoffs involved in buying a more or less efficient washer/drier is exactly the same as the process by which a consumer costs himself money by deciding to buy the thing in the first place.

It’s true that there are certain identifiable irrationalities in human behavior. But an assumption of generally rational behavior serves us well in a lot of contexts. But that assumption needs to be applied in a consistent and comprehensive way. Time and attention constraints are very real aspects of life, and (rationally) navigating them is a big part of what rational people do. CEOs have better things to do than hassle people about insulation. Consumers would rather go see Sherlock Holmes than worry about their hot water heater. Having technical experts set standards for these things can save people time and money.

The Security Line Threat

Obviously as long as we’re going to have terrorist watch lists, then scrutinizing the visa applications of people on the lists seems like something we should do. But I’m extremely skeptical of the value of increased security at airports. The fact of the matter is that death by terrorist attack is extremely rare. Benjamin Friedman points to Nate Silver’s calculation that in the last decade of US flights, there was one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown.

Under the circumstances, investing additional resources in defending airplanes is unlikely to be a cost effective investment. It’s also worth underscoring the fact that flying in an airplane is much safer than driving. Insofar as stepped-up security makes flying both more expensive and more annoying, and therefore pushes more people to drive long distances, we’re going to cost lives rather than save them. And at the end of the day, you have to understand that terrorists are not going to weaken America by killing us all a hundred at a time with bombs. They do much more to weaken America by induces us to waste money and strangle our economy.

The last point I would make, raised by DanVerg on Twitter, is that even if airplanes were completely secure you could always kill people by detonating a bomb in some other crowded place. For example, you could blow something up in a crowded airport security line.

One of the most important parts of counterterrorism is to try to ensure that our society is robust against the possibility of successful attack. Which is to say that if people are murdered by terrorists we need to mourn them, catch and punish the perpetrators, and move on. We need to keep moving people and goods around the country. We need to keep producing and purchasing goods and services. We need to keep our foreign policy focused on the big picture. Hysteria is the goal of attacks, and it’s a shame to see that goal being served in the name of partisan politics.

How Good Is Arne Duncan’s Legacy

I’ve seen both Ezra Klein and Cato’s David Boaz except this exact same paragraph about Chicago Public Schools under Arne Duncan:

Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

I don’t really understand this line of criticism or even why it’s supposed to be damning. I don’t think that anyone ever said that becoming Secretary of Education was like a prize that’s supposed to be handed out to the urban education chancellor who gets the very best results on the NAEP TUDA. Rather, common sense indicates that if you’re going to pick the chief of an urban public school system that you want to find one who’s delivered positive results. And the data shows, rather clearly, than under Arne Duncan Chicago public school kids improved their performance.

Now it’s true that New York City Public Schools under Joel Klein arguably did even better. But if you look back to press coverage of the choice you’ll see that Duncan’s asset over Klein was never based on denying this. Rather, the feeling was that Duncan and Klein have a similar general approach to education policy—an approach that Obama supports—but that Duncan has more of a reputation as a consensus-builder and Klein more as a fighter/bulldozer type. Duncan, consequently, was deemed more likely to be able to build legislative support for a reform program. Many of the other cities that have shown good results in recent years have school systems that are much smaller than New York or Chicago, so their leadership, while impressive, may not have been deemed as qualified to run the federal bureaucracy.

Chester Finn, in the same piece as that critical graf, had a smart take:

“Chicago is not the story of an education miracle,” said Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington. “It is, however, the story of a large urban system that has made some gains and has made some promising structural changes.”

In education, I think we should be suspicious of miracles. Improving schools is hard. Improving whole school systems is harder. Improving educational outcomes is rendered even more difficult by the fact that things that happen outside the classroom make an enormous difference—school administrators are operating a lever that has limited efficacy. But better schools do make a difference for the kids who attend them, and better school systems make a huge difference for the cities that have them. So improvement is worth seeking, especially non-miraculous improvement that can be scaled-up.

On Duncan, long story short he was the chief executive of a large urban school system that implemented some reforms that had theoretical support behind them and that seem to have led to some real improvements. He’s also someone the president knew personally, whose political style matches Obama’s, and whose reputation suits the administration’s political strategy. That seems like a very reasonable choice to me, though there are also other big city school chiefs who have done a good job and a number of different people around the country who could succeed as Secretary of Education.

Sausage Metaphor Blogging

Ezra Klein brings some needed nuance to the sausage-analogy debate:

I think this is too kind to sausagemakers. The expression emerged in a more Upton Sinclair-esque era, when sausagemaking really was gross and dirty and unsafe, but producers let all of that go on because it was also profitable to serve a product that had a bit of rat and a bit of a worker’s finger in it. The most profitable way to make sausage and the best way to make sausage are very different, and we’ve got a lot of regulations that try to narrow that gap.

Sound points. However, this is 2009. Even if the expression was apt at the time it was originated, the times have changed. The modern sausage industry is far from perfect (particularly in terms of the ethics and ecological sustainability of the source meat) but it’s providing a basically safe product.

Elsewhere in the post Ezra draws a distinction between “the best way to make sausage” and “the most cost-effective way to make sausage.” I would sort of problematize that. There’s a difference between the way to make the tastiest sausage and the optimal sausage-production method. Cost to consumers is a real consideration. Compromising quality to meet authentic consumer demand for low-cost tasty food isn’t the same as compromising the quality of legislation simply because legislators are too set in their ways to adopt better procedures.

Outsourced Listicle

I don’t have the energy to make proper “top whatever” lists of movies and songs and albums these days. Indeed, see me bloggingheadsing about the trouble with such lists. But my general sentiments about 2009 in cinema are very close to what Dave Weigel puts together here.

That said, I have a number of disagreements with his nonsensical tweets of 2009 list. A ladder that stretched all the way to the sun would be a very tall ladder indeed. Hence an extremely wobbly once. Thus, “shake it like a ladder to the sun” means to shake it a lot—there’s no nonsense here. Additionally, “Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, there’s nothing you can’t do” strikes me as a pretty banal lyric. New York as “concrete jungle” is a common metaphor and the sense of limitless possibilities is clear. The insertion of an “of” into the line seems moderately ungrammatical but not at all nonsense. And of course Lady Gaga’s “Ra Ra, ah-ah-ah! Roma, ro-ma-ma!” is a declaration of solidarity with the gypsy (i.e., Roma) people.

Meanwhile, my list of “annoying names by bands that are pretty good of 2009″ is unquestionably led by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, who probably should have called themselves The Pains or Pure at Heart. That said “The Tenure Itch” is a great song title.

Sausage is Delicious, Mediocre Legislation is Problematic

Various analogies between the legislative process and sausage-making are always in the air. A hardy perennial of the American political discourse. But when considering the prospects for legislative reform, it’s worth considering some serious differences between the two.

The crux of the difference, I would say, is that comparing the operations of the US Congress to those of a sausage-maker is a huge insult to the sausage industry. You may or may not think that the sausage-making process looks “gross” in some sense, but the fact of the matter is that sausage is delicious. The other day, I made some pesto from scratch. It was good. I served it over pasta with some sausage braised in cider vinegar, and that made it better. Because sausage is delicious. Sausage-making, whether you want to make it or not, is the way you make delicious sausage. If there were some better way to do it, people would do it that way instead.

The US Congress isn’t like that at all. The idea that it’s some kind of gross-looking sausage-making process is, at heart, part of the culture of flattery and egomania that’s made the place so dysfunctional. The implicit moral of the sausage analogy, after all, is that like sausage-making it looks bizarre but is actually the best way to make the product. Actual congressional legislation-writing, by contrast, looks like things like the President proposing to cut agricultural subsidies to the wealthiest farmer, that idea being dead-on-arrival, and nobody being even slightly surprised because everyone knows that the committee system and the over-representation of rural areas make it impossible to contemplate an even vaguely rational approach to this. And farm subsidies aside, whenever members of congress want to signal that they take something very seriously, they do that by proposing that the issue be addressed outside the regular congressional process.

This is often a good idea. But that’s precisely because the regular congressional process is not a good way of making laws. It’s not the only way to make laws. Different models exist abroad. Models exist in US state legislators. Models exist in different ad hoc procedures congress has created to deal with specific problems. The members of congress and their staffs simply choose not to change and improve the process. Because the status quo happens to serve them well.

Rory Stewart on Obama

Rory Stewart, the famous Afghanistan expert and surge skeptic, has a fascinating essay in the New York Review of Books that I think represents the most fulsome and convincing endorsement of the Obama administration’s approach to Afghanistan that I’ve read anywhere.

Pat Riley Knows a Lot About Basketball

John Hollinger hails the “de-Rileyization of the game” as one of the best NBA trends of the decade:

In a response to the increasingly rough tactics of the 1990s, personified by the brutish style that Pat Riley’s teams employed in New York and Miami, the league enforced handchecking rules and made other modifications to open up the floor. The result was a much-more-entertaining style of play and a rebound for the post-Jordan NBA in the second half of the decade. Ironically, Riley stumbled upon the one player best suited for the new rules (Dwyane Wade) and won a championship with him in 2006.

I basically agree, but I don’t think “ironically” is really the best way to look at this. One thing that’s noteworthy about Riley is that while he adopted a very distinctive and much-loathed style in the 1990s, he’s not at all dogmatic about it. That’s not how he coached the Lakers in the 1980s and when the rules changed and it ceased to be the most effective way to run a basketball team he swiftly built a team around a perimeter slasher who thrives in the current system. Some guys, like Don Nelson or Larry Brown, seem monomaniacal about their particular basketball concept. Riley, by contrast, seems to have a very realistic view of the landscape and adapts what he’s doing to the situation.

Corruption in China

If you look at government corruption rankings, it’s no coincidence that democracies tend to predominate among the non-corrupt countries. Simply put, the main way that corruption gets exposed is through a combination of a free press and active, opportunistic opposition parties eager to make hay out of corruption scandals. The Chinese government has had a great deal of success in making autocracy work, but their anti-corruption efforts mostly seem to be highlighting how poorly they’re doing on this score: “Chinese officials misused or embezzled about $35 billion in government money in the first 11 months of the year, according to a national audit released this week.”

There’s also a lesson here for the American right. A consistent theme in right-wing thinking about civil liberties and detention issues seems to be the idea that if only you got the ACLU and their pesky judges out of the way, then we’d then have a hyper-efficient, super-competent law enforcement and intelligence system. The reality is likely different. By curbing democratic control on the government, you would in practice be empowering more abuse and corruption.

The Right’s Opportunity in Health Reform

Repeal nonsense aside, it seems to me that conservatives should really be hoping that Obamacare works really really really well. After all, if it turns out that Obama has succeeded in creating a stable, workable version of the individual market for health insurance then that would open up a politically realistic approach to the longstanding conservative idea of privatizing and voucherizing Medicare. That would essentially entail treating 68 year-olds the same way Obama proposes to treat 58 year-olds.

Right now, that’s a political non-starter. 68 year-olds like their socialized medicine just fine, and 58 year-olds want to keep it in place for them to start benefitting from it soon. And the individual health insurance market is a disaster for older people. But if Obamacare can make it work, then expanding its vision to include senior citizens starts to look plausible.

Conversely, if Obamacare is plagued by certain kinds of problems that could renew political pressure for things like Medicare buy-in or the creation of a new public option.

Repeal Can’t Happen, Rollback Can

Dave Weigel has a good report on the repeal health reform movement:

But as Republicans gravitate towards a repeal message for the 2010 elections, they’re running up against the reality that health care reform would be prohibitively hard to roll back. According to conservative health care analysts, legal analysts, and political strategists, if President Obama signs health care reform into law, Republicans will have extremely limited opportunities to repeal any part of it.

“Anyone who thinks they’ll be able to repeal ObamaCare is kidding themselves,” said Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “If they want to stop it, they need to stop it now.”

Michael Cannon is a smart guy. This law, if signed, will change the game. People will still debate what to do about health care, but it will be in a new framework. As Austin Frakt says, a more plausible scenario would be to just hurt low-income people:

What I think is more likely than repeal, though by no means certain or even highly probable, is an erosion of the low-income subsidies in real terms, perhaps tied to a change in the minimum level of coverage required. A Republican congress and president might pass such changes along with a tax cut. It is very likely that Republican candidates will campaign on it.

Maybe. It should be said, though, that there’s really no precedent for a GOP president taking the ax to a major program. Small, highly targeted programs like Section 8 housing vouchers or legal services for the indigent get the axe when Republicans run things. But cutting spending has not normally been an important priority. Cutting taxes, busting unions, gutting enforcement of various regulations, hiking spending on baroque missile defense schemes, that’s what conservative governance is all about.

The only reason you would try to seriously pare back subsidies is if you felt that increasing budget deficits were a bad thing. But conservatives don’t think deficits are a problem so there’s really nothing here.

Exchange Rate Policy as Monetary Policy

Dean Baker thinks that if the Chinese are really worried about inflation that they should consider giving in to longstanding American demands to let their currency appreciate vis-a-vis the dollar.

This is true. But I think it highlights a broader and more interesting point. China’s currency peg is, in effect, a kind of monetary policy. China, via its peg, is implementing monetary policy that is producing some risks of inflation. And I think that if Baker or Paul Krugman were looking at the American situation they would say that this is the right thing to do. Given the state of the overall economy it’s perverse to be doing anything less than going full-tilt at bolstering employment rates. And that’s what the Chinese are doing.

The question isn’t why is China running such loose monetary policy, the question is why aren’t the western central banks running looser policy ourselves along the lines of the Gagnon Plan or price-level targeting or a higher inflation target or a nominal GDP target. If monetary policy at the ECB, the Fed, the Bank of England, etc. were all much looser, then China would need to choose between either dramatic further loosening of monetary policy or else permitting its currency to appreciate relative to the dollar. Since they’re worried about inflation, they would probably choose appreciation. And that would be the right way to achieve what American policymakers say they want. Merely haranguing China about the need for China to tighten monetary policy in the face of too-tight US monetary policy isn’t going to do much good.

In China, if unemployment goes to ten percent the government is going to get overthrown. So the Chinese government is doing everything possible to prevent mass unemployment. The question should be why our own democratically elected government isn’t doing the same?

Context for Revolution in Iran

SamInMpls tweets “@mattyglesias I have this weird expectation that you’ll write something on the events in Iran within the historical context of revolutions.”

I’m not sure how well I can do on that score, but I have read Theda Skocpol’s 1979 study States and Social Revolutions which I’m sure is outdated by now but can plausibly shed some light on the situation. One of the major preoccupations of the book is to try to take down Marxist or quasi-Marxist accounts of revolution that see these upheavals purely in terms of class. Skocpol maintains, in a way that I think is very relevant in the Iranian case, that to understand revolutions you need to understand the importance of the state as a more-or-less autonomous coercive apparatus.

As I recall, her argument, to simplify a bit, is that in key revolutionary cases you have a state that’s faced with a hostile international situation. In the face of that situation, it attempts to implement a series of reforms that will that will strengthen state capacity and make it easier to deal with the situation. That, however, alienates key elites (think the nobles in immediately pre-revolutionary France) and sets the stage for a potential collapse of state authority in the face of unrest. If you want to try to place what’s happening now in Iran into that context, you would note the key role in the current opposition movement being played by what were very recently regime figure—Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karoubi, etc.—who nominally want to “restore” the Islamic Republic to some purer, more original pre-Ahmedenijad form. Meanwhile the regime, as currently constituted, has as its real base not Shiite clerics and religious authorities, but military and security organizations that the revolution brought into being.

That said, I’m not really sure how much this kind of analysis supplies. On a basic level I think what we’re seeing is a struggle for the hearts and minds of the “everyday” members of the regime. When you have a bad government in place, that doesn’t mean that every single local cop, train conductor, or corporal in the army is a bad person. Even under a bad regime most people don’t become “dissidents” they just keep their heads down and try to plug along. Patriots feel their country needs a military, that crimes need investigating, that trains need to run, etc. A regime can count on special, ideologically formations to do its dirtiest dirty work for it, but it needs lots of ordinary people to go along too. The protestors’ pitch is “hey, we—here in the streets—are Iran; if you want to serve Iran you have to not collaborate with the regime’s efforts to violently disperse us.” The government’s pitch is that the protestors are tools of foreign powers who hate Iran.

Migration vs Domestic Migration

All indications are that the center of American population has continued to drift in the direction of the sunbelt. That said, I was puzzled by a lot of what I was reading in this Wendell Cox item on how the 00s were “the decade of the South,” specifically an assertion that I read as claiming that New York City lost population during the course of the decade:

New York alone lost 1.65 million over the 2000-2009 period. This is, in absolute numbers, more than California and a larger percentage loss than Louisiana with Katrina and Rita. Critically, data through 2008 shows that most of the domestic migration losses came from New York City and to a lesser extent its suburbs. Upstate New York, which also missed the housing bubble, experienced comparatively modest domestic migration losses, as Ed McMahon and I showed in an Empire Center policy report earlier this year.

New York City, after all, is clearly gaining people:

The difference turns out to be that Cox is focused exclusively on domestic migration. There’s a large net inflow of foreigners into New York City. And if you think about it, I think it becomes clear that it’s almost inevitable that a major entrepôt for immigrants is going to be a net exporter of domestic people. Think of the influx of Jewish immigrants to New York City, and then the diffusion of their descendants (i.e., domestic migration) into the suburbs and into other metropolitan areas. Similarly, cities like Los Angeles and Chicago that are large importers of Mexican-born people are going to be net exporters of US-born people of Mexican ancestry.

This seems to me like a very different dynamic than the absolute population decline that we saw in most traditional cities in recent decades and that continues to take place in some of them. It’s worth not conflating the two.

Ackerman vs Buchanan

My friend Spencer Ackerman’s “Morning Joe” appearance this morning took place way too early for me to catch live during a staycation week. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet I was able to watch the clip. And now so are you:

It’s worth emphasizing that as best I can tell the basic conservative view is actually that no criminal suspects are entitled to due process. They didn’t approve of the Miranda ruling or any of the other Supreme Court precedents establishing the rights of the accused. The argument that terrorists, or foreign-born terrorists, or some other sub-class of individuals shouldn’t get those rights isn’t really an argument about terrorists or non-citizens, it’s just a thin edge of a general campaign against the rule of law.

The End of Counterinsurgency

This final paragraph from Andrew Exum’s brief Boston Review note about Afghanistan seems pretty baffling to me:

The one lesson we have all—military officer, politician, and journalist alike—learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, though, is that it is best to avoid such conflicts in the first place. I, then, am one of many hoping that the Third Counterinsurgency Era will soon draw to a close. And on this point, I think Rosen and I agree.

Who is the “we” who have all learned this? Joe Lieberman? Fred Kagan? Bill Kristol? I think most military officers already knew this—the senior command of the military was notoriously skeptical about the invasion of Iraq. It seems to me that relative to where we were in 2002-2003 elites in the military-politico-journalism power structure are more skeptical of the merits of invading countries, but that relative to where we were in 2006 they’re less skeptical.

I also note that in his blog post linking to that item, Exum actually says something a bit different, not that he’s hoping the era of counterinsurgency will end but that he’s predicting it will: “While small wars and insurgencies will continue to take place across the globe, the United States and other western powers will not soon stomach another large-scale intervention requiring counterinsurgency operations along the lines of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Personally I think it’s hard to know what the future will hold in this regard. History indicates to me that it’s relatively easy for presidents to mobilize public support for foreign interventions that they want to undertake, and there’s little in the way of objective checks to presidential authority in this vein. Different presidents will take different approaches, but my suspicion is that we’ll keep intervening fairly forcefully around the world until such time that the power gap with China and/or India closes enough to actually check our ability to do so.