Matt Yglesias

Steele on White Guilt

Well I’m on the ground in Aspen now at the Atlantic Ideas Festival that Just Happens to be Taking Place in Aspen (it’s been renamed…) and it’s really beautiful though I kind of wish there was more oxygen in the air. But they didn’t bring me out here just to enjoy the view, I’m supposed to write about the ideas in play at the festival. So here goes.

Shelby Steele offered some interesting thoughts on the subject of “white guilt” observing that in post-white supremacist America it can be very damaging to a person or institution’s reputation to be labeled as a racist. Consequently, people and institutions put a lot of emphasis on avoiding having that happen. This, according to Steele, often crowds out pragmatic consideration of issues like “is this actually helping people.” He gives vintage AFDC and affirmative action as practiced at most institutions of higher education as examples — practices aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of elite institutions rather than aimed at actually solving problems of poverty and structural inequities in education.

That all seemed pretty plausible to me, actually. Then I thought he went awry by alleging that we’ve been overly “sensitive” in our conduct of war recently for reasons of white guilt and that this is why we’re bogged down in Iraq — too much focus on the legitimacy of our efforts, and not enough focus on “winning.” I think this mostly shows that Steele has a lot more background in social policy than in military policy. I’d say, as the counterinsurgency manual says that legitimacy is absolutely vital in a modern war-fighting situation.

A Country for Old Men

Not quite sure how to feel about Antawn Jamison’s new contract. It sounds like folly to offer a big money contract to a 32 year-old, but there’s been no deterioration in his skills so maybe it’ll pay off. But who were the Wizards bidding against here?

Numbers Tell

Chad Ford repeats a common assessment of Andris Biedrins: “Biedrins falls a little bit into the Anderson Varejao category — energetic big man whose stats don’t tell the whole story in terms of on-court contributions.”

But here’s the thing: Unless by “stats” you mean “per game scoring average and nothing else” the story Biedrins’ stats tell you is that he’s a very good player. His stats tell me that he average 9.8 rebounds per game in 27.4 mpg. They tell me that his 10.5 ppg came on an extraordinarily good 63 percent field goal percentage. They tell me that the Warriors defense was better with Biedrins on the floor. These contributions are perfectly quantifiable.

Aspiring Journogoon Wanted

Charles Krauthammer is looking for a research assistant. Should be a pretty good gig, because this isn’t the kind of research assistant position that requires you to get accurate facts or anything.

Gil’s Money

I think Chad Ford amptly sums up Gilbert Arenas’ free agent status:

The biggest issue for Arenas is the same one that plagues all the free agents: Who else has the money to pay him? I can’t see the 76ers or Grizzlies spending the cash. The Clippers would have interest, but Arenas already spurned them once.

That’s why I find things like this so hard to understand: “According to a league source familiar with the situation, Wizards President Ernie Grunfeld plans on soon offering Arenas a lucrative long-term contract, one that could cover up to six years and could be worth more than $100 million.” It would be one thing if the Clippers had actually offered Arenas, say, a $90 million contract and the Wizards were countering. That kind of money would still, in my view, be a mistake but I could understand it on some level. But why make a pre-emptive bid like that.

Statements

One:

“Senator Obama had a terrific conversation with President Clinton and is honored to have his support in this campaign. He has always believed that Bill Clinton is one of this nation’s great leaders and most brilliant minds, and looks forward to seeing him on the campaign trail and receiving his counsel in the months to come,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Two:

Statement by Matt McKenna, Director of Communications, Office of President Clinton, on President Clinton’s Discussion with Senator Barack Obama:

President Clinton had a very good conversation with Senator Obama today. He renewed his offer to do whatever he can to ensure Senator Obama is our next President.

President Clinton continues to be impressed by Senator Obama and the campaign he has run, and looks forward to campaigning for and with him in the months to come. The President believes that Senator Obama has been a great inspiration for millions of people around the country, and he knows that he will bring the change America needs as our next President.

Let the parsing begin!

Winning the Week

Good Chris Bowers rant.

The Lame Factor

So as it turns out my flight had DirectTV on it and I did get to see Barack Obama’s speech on patriotism after all. I thought it was a little bit lame and defensive, frankly, though certainly not nearly as lame as the campaign’s decision to hang Wes Clark out to dry for making a clearly true observation.

All that said, I read at the end of last week that McCain had “won the week” and I read the same thing after the week before that and yet despite all these winning weeks McCain is losing the election by a comfortable margin. And on some level I think this accounts for some of the lameness of the Obama campaign which, I’m now recalling, had a marked tendency to lapse into prolonged stretches of lameness during the primary only to raise it game at moments when Hillary Clinton’s attacks seemed to be getting traction. The organizational elements — field and fundraising — were brilliant throughout, but on the messaging level it was kind of a judo campaign that only really looked good when it looked like they were about to get buried. Right now, McCain’s flailing around and not getting traction with anything, and Obama seems to have retreated into a super-cautious mode just focused on parrying McCain’s feeble blows.

The Half-Empty Glass

Steve Harrelson represents District 1 in the Arkansas House of Representatives. He’s also Majority Leader of the Arkansas House. And he also writes a very comprehensive Arkansas politics blog called “Under the Dome.” This, to me, is a kind of fascinating development that potentially has a lot of promise for state and local officials who don’t necessarily have big staffs. So I was glad to see that yesterday at DLC’s National Conversation he was one of the panelists on a “breakout session” for state and local elected officials talking about “new social media.”

Unfortunately, it seemed that there was virtually no interest in this from the audience. All anyone wanted to talk about was fear about what might go wrong on the internet. Could one of my kids write something on their Facebook page that embarrasses me? What if I become the victim of unfair attacks from anonymous people writing online? What about journalistic standards? Wither truth? The whole litany of internet-related fears. And I think you have to admit that these concerns have at least some validity. With any new significant technology you have your pros and your cons, your positive developments and some negative ones. But to me it’s just fundamentally crazy to look at the brilliant new communications tools of the internet and primarily see something to be frightened of rather than new opportunities to take advantage of.

The good news, I suppose, is that at least as far as elected officials are concerned we should see a Darwinian process. Harrelson and others who start thinking about what new things they can do to communicate and connect with people should see more and more success, while those who want to recoil in fear will see less and less. But this also speaks to a real potential opening for institutions — state and local government has enormous weight as a whole, and I suspect that whichever party or ideological tendency acts first to develop programs to make its people comfortable with new technologies and its possibilities can secure a real advantage.

Bringing the World Together

Turns out the Denver Airport has an indoor smoking lounge, a sign that despite Barack Obama’s lead in the polls Colorado’s not yet a truly blue state. But the fact that I immediately interpret the signal that way is a reminder that it’s a bit strange that relatively smoker-friendly public policy is typical of both middle America and the dread Europeans.

How to Run an Empire

Via Kevin Drum, I see that “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say.” There’s more to the war than this kind of thing, but it’s naive to deny that this kind of thing plays a large role in providing the impetus for a continued American involvement.

But more important, it’s crucial to recall that this sort of thing renders the US military presence in Iraq a destabilizing force in that country. Our troops aren’t merely a destabilizing force, it’s clear that in many respects they’re providing order — especially local order. But at the same time the fact of American occupation generates a structure cause of disorder that saps the Iraqi government of illegitimacy and given our poor relations with Iraq’s key neighbors turns the country into a field for proxy battles.

By Request: Convention in Spanish

Longtime troll TLB wants me to write about the announcement that the Democratic Convention will be simulcast in Spanish. Unlike anti-immigrant obsessives, I don’t necessarily regard this kind of thing as a huge deal, but I actually do think there’s something lamentable about the trend toward a greater volume of Spanish-language political communication.

It’s just common sense that many jurisdictions provide services in Spanish or whatever other languages may be commonly spoken in any given area. But to me it makes a lot of sense to say that we should work to maintain a monolingual political conversation that expects citizens to be able to deliberate with their fellow citizens in English. Many countries have no realistic alternative other than to try to make bilingualism (or more) work but it’s really difficult in practice (Will Kymlicka says some smart things about this in Politics in the Vernacular as I recall) and we shouldn’t move in that direction.

Draft Trades 1

It’s a bit late to be commenting on this, but hasn’t Kevin McHale pulled off a great deal swapping O.J. Mayo, Antoine Walker, Marko Jaric, and Greg Buckner for Kevin Love, Mike Miller, Brian Cardinal, and Jason Collins? Of the eight players in this deal, there are two prospects, five scrubs, and one good player. McHale got the good player. And while I wouldn’t be shocked if Mayo turned out to be a better player than Love, I wouldn’t be shocked if things turned out the other way. And the Timberwolves didn’t take any kind of financial hit on this in terms of contracts.

Basically the Wolves exchanged one plausible #3 draft pick for another totally plausible #3 draft pick and snagged Mike Miller in the bargain. That’s still not a playoff team in the West, but it’s a pretty damn solid trade.

The Big Test

Joe Lieberman on Face The Nation says “our enemies will test the new president early. Remember that the truck bombing of the World Trade Center happened in the first year of the Clinton administration. 9/11 happened in the first year of the Bush administration.” This sounds more like a coincidence to me than a deliberate strategy. If congress had repealed the 22nd amendment and Bill Clinton had won a third term in 2000 (which he surely could have done) then would al-Qaeda really have abandoned its plans?

But if you think Lieberman’s right about this, then it’s not really clear what follows. If terrorist attack frequency is a function of the efficacy of counter-terrorism policies, then clearly you want to pick a president who has good counter-terrorism policies. I say that’s Obama, Lieberman says that’s McCain and then we have the argument. But if Lieberman’s right and an attack is just going to happen one way or another because the enemy wants to “test” the new president, then what’s supposed to determine our choice? What counts as passing the test? I guess Lieberman wants to imply that we haven’t been attacked again (except, of course, for the thousands of Americans who’ve died in Iraq) because Bush passed the test of 9/11, but do we really think al-Qaeda works this way? They’re just kind of probing us, testing, checking us out, and then giving up their efforts?

It doesn’t make sense and it’s a big deal. I’m sure there’s political calculation here and a view that talking about terrorism, no matter how nonsensically, helps conservative candidates. But there’s also a very real underlying incoherence in the conservative conception of how to think about the al-Qaeda phenomenon, an unwillingness to understand efforts to destroy the enemy and secure the United States as a practical problem that requires actual knowledge and reasonably crafted policies. Instead, they prefer to see it as a kind of grown-up version of a staring contest or a power ring battle.

But the fundamental thing to recall about al-Qaeda is that they’re not in a position to “test” us. We are a giant country full of huge cities with a GDP of over $13 trillion, a population of around 300 million, nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, tanks, etc. and allies that include such major countries as Japan, Britain, France, etc. They are a smallish band of maybe thousands with no heavy weapons whose allies include some tribal leaders in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. Horrible as 9/11 was, they can’t seriously harm the United States except by baiting us into doing incredibly stupid things like responding to fear of their pinpricks by resolving to endlessly prolong a wasteful and pointless military engagement on the other side of the world.

Why The Air Force Can’t Change

Various complaints can be raised against the extent to which various security organs of the United States remain somewhat fixated on a Cold War mentality. But all the relevant institutions have to some extent adapted — and certainly the Army and Navy busy themselves with plenty of other things besides prepping for war with China. But the Air Force seems different, stuck in the past (USSR) or hypotheticals (China) rather than dealing with the world as it is. Robert Farley has an interesting hypothesis as to why:

The larger problem for the Air Force is that both the Army and Navy have long traditions to borrow from, such that they are capable of “re-inventing” themselves while retaining a sense of identity. Both the Army and the Navy can also borrow from the histories of foreign military organizations; the Navy rather self-consciously styles itself as the modern equivalent of the nineteenth century Royal Navy. The Air Force lacks historical traditions to borrow from, both because it is such a new service, and because it has been a worldwide leader since its inception. Put briefly, the Air Force only knows the Cold War; it only understands conflict in terms of great power struggle, and as such all future planning (in contrast to short term compromises) will be oriented around that organizational purpose. To ask the Air Force not to think in terms of great power war is to ask it not to be the Air Force, but rather some other organization born at some other time for some other purpose. As such, Gates cleaning out of the brass isn’t really going to amount to much; it is literally in the DNA of the Air Force to act in this way.

On another level, though, I think it reflects the fact that our current national security issues, while troubling, really don’t rise to the level of enormous national emergency the way the Civil War or World War II or in a different way the outbreak of the Cold War did. Iraq or even Afghanistan just isn’t a “do or die” situation that’s going to create unstoppable political pressure on institutions to adapt. The fact that our country is objectively less threatened than it has been at various times in the past is, naturally, a good thing. But it also means that adaptation to the contemporary environment isn’t as snappy as one might like.

Baby on Board

Via Tyler Cowen, Russell Shorto explains where babies come from:

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

I go back and forth on whether the low fertility rates in places like Italy or Japan is a real problem. Some folks predict all manner of ills stemming from the possibility of population decline, but it also seems possible that it might lead to rising standards of living and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen the issue given a really rigorous treatment with models and dull equations.

Photo by Flickr user Tedsblog used under a Creative Commons license

Patriotism

Barack Obama’s set to deliver a “major speech” on “what patriotism means to him and what it requires of all Americans who loves this country and want to see it do better.” Since Americans do seem to have lingering doubts about the patriotism of Democrats in general and Obama in particular, and since Obama’s very good at delivering setpiece speeches, this seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to see it live since I’ll be traveling from Chicago to the Aspen Ideas Festival The Atlantic is co-hosting this week in Colorado.

The New World

I haven’t actually attended very much of the DLC’s National Conversation (seemed more fun to go out and see Chicago) but I did catch most of Markos, the Great Orange Satan himself, on a panel with various other worthies. Not much of interest was said, really, but at one point he did call Joe Lieberman “an asshole” and received applause from many and no boos or dissent from anyone else.

Requests Thread

Haven’t done one of these in a little bit, and the schedule’s going to be kind of hectic for the next few days between traveling to and from Aspen and trying to attend/cover the Ideas Festival but what are you guys interested in?

Groupies Wanted

This business about the Hold Steady not having any groupies seems tragic to me — there are many worse bands out there, and not very many better ones. Surely they deserve a groupie or two.