Rand Paul and Right-Wing Libertarianism

By now, must of us now that the Republican candidate for Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, has decided to quickly ruin his honeymoon period following his landslide primary victory by suggesting that he would be opposed to crucial components of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (he said that he supports ending public discrimination, voting, segregation in public services, etc.; the controversy was over his claim that the federal government should not prohibit racial discrimination in businesses). 


A number of people have taken him to task for this, including most prominently Rachel Maddow and George Stephanopolous. Bruce Bartlett I think has an excellent take on it. One line of defense for Paul, indeed his own line of defense, is that he is not a racist, just a principled believer in libertarianism. He himself claimed that finding himself in the position of having to defend the right of private business to engage in racial discrimination to be "the hard part about believing in freedom." Yglesias skewers this, pointing out that claiming to not be a racist but rather stuck due to your principles not only defending the rights of racists to be racist but defending their insistence on maintaining a vicious form of oppression is possibly even more damning than being a conservative.

I always find it shocking that conservatives in 2010 openly say that the political founder of their movement and an icon to be admired is Barry Goldwater, and that Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign was an admirable thing that constitutes a key foundationstone of the modern conservative movement.....Whenever I bring this up, people quickly rush to assure me that Goldwater didn’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important political issue of his time out of racism, instead at the decisive moment in his career he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists out of principled constitutional reasoning that made it impossible for him to do otherwise. But this is actually more damning....[H]aving acquired a major party presidential nomination he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important issue of the day because his sincere political ideology led to horribly wrongheaded conclusions.

Likewise, Adam Serwer points out that 

Paul would never face the actual "hard part" of his vision of freedom, because it would never interfere with his own life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. Rand Paul would not have been turned away from a lunch counter, be refused a home, a job, or denied a loan, or told to sit in the black car of a train because of his skin color, or because of the skin color of his spouse. Paul thinks there is something "hard" about defending the kind of discrimination he would have never, ever faced. Paul's free-market fundamentalism is being expressed after decades of social transformation that the Civil Rights Act helped create, and so the hell of segregation is but a mere abstraction, difficult to remember and easy to dismiss as belonging only to its time. It's much easier now to say that "the market would handle it." But it didn't, and it wouldn't.

 Both of these critiques accept at face-value the premise that Paul's position here is driven by his philosophical belief in liberty as the right to engage in private acts without the intervention of the state. And accordingly, I think they are very compelling critiques: they do not just cry hypocrisy, but rather argue that it is the adherence to the principles themselves that requires acquiescence to manifest injustice.

I, however, am somewhat of a less noble man, and am just going to cry hypocrisy. Or at the very least point out what I consider to be a tendency in modern libertarianism that I have difficulty explaining in a non-cynical fashion.

Libertarians hate the National Labor Relations Act. They hate unions. And yet the capitalist corporation can do very little wrong. (It was noteworthy that Paul today was criticizing President Obama for being too critical of BP for the Gulf spill: "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.")

Now yes I know that we are all brought up to think 'corporations, intrinsic to market economies and free enterprise' and 'unions, wedge in the door for socialist takeover.' And certainly unions have articulated critiques of capitalism and market economies from their inception (of course, corporations and the trusts in the early 20th century had armies of apologists saying that the rise of the monopolistic corporation and the centralization of the economy into an economic oligarchy was the height of progress, a near-inevitable trajectory to a better life, provided the unions and do-gooders didn't screw things up.) But it seems to me that the union is a mirror image (somewhat distorted) of the corporation: they both create a space of non-market relations within a market economy. They both entail the combination of individually controlled factors (capital and labor) so as to achieve better terms of trade. And the strike? Exactly what labor should be doing in a market economy: trying to maximize its utility, in this case by maximizing the wages or benefits of its members. If a corporation decided not to produce a good or sell a good below a certain price, its hard to believe that libertarians would find here an assault on the foundations of liberty.

There are obviously key differences between them, but they are both fundamentally market actors. Furthermore, while libertarians hate the National Labor Relations Labor Act, for providing institutionalized supports for unions, they don't seem to have any gripe with the court decisions and state institutions that provide a similar, public foundation for the development of the modern corporation.

Yglesias rightly points out that

any effort to ground your political philosophy in an incredibly rigid and dogmatic division between what’s “public” and what’s “private” is ultimately going to fail. For one thing, as Charles Lane points out the way you enforce your private “no black customers in my restaurant” law is by having the police arrest someone for trespassing.

And like I said, the critique that adherence to libertarian principles both leads you to morally repulsive conclusions and relies heavily on a distinction between public and private that is often impossible to sustain is a deep criticism of libertarianism as a philosophy. But practically speaking, in my readings and debates with libertarians, it is not just the combination of a repulsion of any form of public power (no matter how democratically legitimated or controlled) with a total indifference to massive concentrations of private power that strikes me; it is also their glorification of certain 'private' concentrations of power and their vilification of other 'private' concentrations of power. I've never heard a convincing explanation for why the combination of capital is not a threat to liberty, but the combination of labor is such a threat (the most frequent retort is that the combination of capital leads to certain goods, such as economic growth, that outweigh the potential threat. Of course unions also provide important goods, such as providing for community stability and greater income growth for the median member of society, but these goods tend to be rejected out of hand, almost as though they cannot be considered as a matter of first principles).

Which leads me to the more cynical reason for this pattern suggested by Steve Benen

if the government is considering a measure that interferes with the practices of a private entity, it's necessarily unacceptable. (Unless, of course, we're talking about a woman's uterus or a gay couple's bedroom, which Rand Paul defines as public entities.)

 That is, libertarianism as it is practiced in the contemporary United States is really just window dressing for right-wing policies. The unpopular positions right wing positions (scrap the minimum wage, remove all public support for unions, opposition to the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and a host of others) are portrayed as a principle stance, the "hard part about believing in freedom," while the politicians who advance the cause nonetheless make exceptions for abortion, gay marriage, religious fundamentalism in public education, and the like. I don't honestly believe this: I respect and have learned much from libertarians opposition to encroachments on civil liberties. But the more the Pauls elder and son become the public face of libertarianism in America, the more this cynicism rings true as a matter of practical politics.

p.s I really should add, and really should start following, the insights of Brink Lindsey.

I’m a libertarian because I’m a liberal.  In other words, I support small-government, free-market policies because I believe they provide the institutional framework best suited to advancing the liberal values of individual autonomy, tolerance, and open-mindedness. Liberalism is my bottom line; libertarianism is a means to promoting that end.Ron Paul, by contrast, is no liberal. Just look at his xenophobia, his sovereignty-obsessed nationalism, his fondness for conspiracy theories, his religious fundamentalism — here is someone with a crudely authoritarian worldview. The snarling bigotry of his newsletters is just the underside of this rotten log.

Elections in the UK

Although I have not been posting any of this here, I have been making a number of predictions on the UK election, most of which have turned out to be reasonably accurate so far. I'll recap:

The day of the election I bet a friend that the final results would be
Tories: 307
Labour: 230
Lib Dems: 90.

Now with the exception of the Tory call, this is pretty off. My reasoning was that everyone was predicting 100+ and even ~120 seats for the Lib Dems, and that I thought this was very optimistic. The fundamentals of the system had not changed (still a plurality single member district election), the party identification rates in the country were largely unaffected by the surge in support for the Lib Dems, and the surge was largely based on the performance of Clegg in the first debate, which was followed by underwhelming performances in the subsequent debates. The first debate made the Lib Dems seem viable, but was probably not enough to dispel anxieties about wasting the vote.

So I adjusted my expectation of the Lib Dem vote so that it would be below what was being predicted. I would have gone lower (with the balance going to the Labour party), but I wanted to remain reasonably close to the prediction made by my friend, for no reason other than saving face if the prediction was off.

It was obvious (I believed at least) that there was no way there could be a Lab-Lib pact; this was clear as soon as it was evident that together they could not command a majority. What's the point then, really, if you are going to take all the heat for sustaining "an unelected leader" in Brown as PM, or denying the Tories an opportunity to form a government, if you are probably going to have to go back to the polls in a few weeks/months. (I should note that I agree there is nothing morally illegitimate about Brown forming a government even having come in second to a resurgent Tory party; rather, I think that the conservative and middle-class press would hammer on about this as being illegitimate such that it became very costly politically). And besides, it was clear that the Tory leadership (we'll have to see about the base) was so lusty for power that it would have given Clegg the abolition of the monarchy if he'd have asked. So I predicted the day after the election that there would be a Tory-Liberal government in place before Friday May 14th.

The big question would be the terms of the coalition, specifically whether the Tories would push ahead with their "fuck you" emergency budget. I suspected that (1) they were being told by the ministry of the exchequer (or whatever it is) that they couldn't take the money out of the system this year, (2) that they had received the endorsement of the Financial Times and Economist, both of which harshly criticized the emergency budget cuts proposed by the Tories, on the basis of a winked suggestion that if elected they wouldn't really go through with it, and (3) the fact that the Lib Dems campaigned against it would give the Tory leadership an opportunity to back away from the plan. If they went ahead with the budget, I suspected that it would be very difficult for the party activists in the Lib Dems to support their leadership, but that the leadership would feel compelled to support the budget so as to (1) get a real taste of power, (2) avoid a quick election.

Additionally, I suspected that they would give the Lib Dems something in the way of electoral reform, but that it would be a real cynical job. Possibly a commission to study electoral reform, but apparently Tony Blair had already given that to the Lib Dems before and promptly ignored the recommendations. More likely, a heresthetically rigged referendum on an insufficient proposal. Specifically, I suggested that the Tories would "offer an electoral reform that is less proportional than what the Lib Dems want and better for the Tories, but enough of a reform that Lib Dems might be stuck agreeing with, and they'll have it in a referendum with a 55% threshold." And we can, of course, get even more cynical: a referendum with "three options: status quo, AV, and whatever works in the Tories' favour, and the status quo stays if neither of the other two options gets above 50%.Of course the Tories, as the dominant partner in the government, will likely have a substantial advantage in campaigning when they come out against AV in the referendum (but I don't know the details of British referendum law, or whether there even is a standing law on the matter).

From this I predicted at least 8 months of a Tory-Lib pact. The election would depend on whether (1) the Tories had gone through with the asshole budget, and (2) whether the damage done by the budget would have severely undermined the fragile economic recovery.

Well today the deal has been released. And I think that the Lib Dems are in long term trouble. Not only are the Tories going ahead with the cutting-spree,  but they have even placed one of the Lib Dems most right-wing MPs in the cabinet position responsible for doing so.

They are going ahead with ""Accelerated" action to cut the budget deficit: £6bn of spending cuts this year " and "Measures to promote financial stability and support business growth," which of course means business tax cuts. The 1% NI tax is scrapped, meaning that there will have to be more cuts elsewhere to make up the difference (between that, the business tax cuts, and the higher threshold for poor families before having to pay taxes, you'd think they weren't really concerned about the deficit at all).

Well what about electoral reform. Surely if the Lib Dems are going to be responsible for making drastic cuts that they opposed throughout the campaign, then they must have got something in the way of electoral reform? Right?

1. A referendum on AV, which is a weaker form of the AV+ offered by Labour, neither of which would be anywhere close to proportional representation, and therefore barely address the major inequality of the system (see here or here).
2. A cut in the number of MPs, which in either a AV or first past the post system can only make it less representative.
 3. Fixed elections every 5 years. If you are going to have fixed elections, I'd much prefer it to be every three or four years. I'm somewhat sympathetic (but not terribly) to the claim that the U.S. House of Representative system of voting every two years impedes long-term strategic planning, but I see four years as a perfectly reasonable amount of time. The point is that the more frequent, the more democratic. This does not make it necessarily better in terms of governance (elections once a month would probably be disastrous), but given that all the parties were complaining about the electoral system in terms of how it was not democratic enough, this seems to be a movement in the opposite direction.
4. Of course, "a review of Scottish MPs voting on England-only legislation" so that the Labour party will be weakened even further.
5.  And a true shocker: "55% of MPs required to bring government down in confidence vote." Which is basically meant to make it so that even without the Lib Dems the Tories can survive a non-confidence vote (it would then take 358 votes instead of 326 to defeat the government. Or seen another way, the government would need only 292 seats to hold onto power, which the Tories have).

So the Liberal Democrats get to walk back their opposition to, and even made to share responsibility for, a substantial cut in government spending during the midst of a very fragile recovery; and they get a referendum (which I still expect to be heresthetically rigged) on a voting system that doesn't really overcome the massive disparity between their vote share and their seat share that results from the current system. They also get rid of the Tory plan to scrap the inheritance tax, and a rise in the tax threshold so that more low-income families don't have to pay income taxes.

As one Lib Dem MP put it "I can't believe how much they've offered us....The Tories have basically rubbed out their manifesto and inserted ours. We'll have to cope for four or five years with our flesh creeping, but still."

I think they are going to find the coping very difficult indeed. The Tories get power; they get to continue trying to soften their image; they get to foreclose the threat of a move toward AV+ or a proportional representation scheme that would have been more detrimental to them.

The Lib Dems? Their activists will be in revolt (it's begun); their leadership will be responsible for policies they have opposed; their English constituency (who are mostly middle class could-be Tories, who find the Tories to be just a touch too cruel) likely will be drawn toward the Tory party as that party's image is softened, while the Scottish constituency moves toward Labour or the SNP.

I would be shocked if this lasts 5 years; but I suspect that it will last more than 8 months. Its chances of lasting even that long, however, depend largely on whether the emergency budget plunges the country into a double dip recession. If it does, it'll be a tough policy to walk back. The Tory base is not going to want to see that walk back and will probably be adamant that Cameron stick with it. The Lib Dem base will demand that it be reversed, but probably won't stop there and will demand a firm break with the Tories.

Classic David Brooks

I'm not sure really if classic is the right word... the structure of the argument is pretty standard Brooks, although not the best example.

But this line is just phenomenal

As Stephen J. Rose points out in his book “Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger From the Financial Crisis,” when income is adjusted for family size, the percentage of prime-age American adults earning between $35,000 and $70,000 declined by 12 points between 1979 and 2007. But that’s largely because the percentage earning more than $105,000 increased by 14 points. Over the last 10 years, 60 percent of Americans made more than $100,000 in at least one of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three.

The great thing about this quote is that there is almost no way that this is true. And maybe the blame is to be placed on Rose. Or maybe Brooks screwed up in interpreting Rose's statistics. But surely there must be an editor at the Times that would have thought.....hmmm this certainly doesn't sound remotely plausible (of course, maybe none of the editors at the Times move in circles in which the absurdity of this claim would be plausible. They might, after all, be thinking "well $100,000 ain't that great").

And of course, it is not plausible. It is conceivable in the most literal sense of the word, but in order for it to be the case there would have to be an enormous amount of mobility across income levels over these ten years. Cause the average per year is pretty stable at around 20%. So unless 40% of Americans are just hanging out under the threshold, and there is exceptionally high turnover between them and the Americans above $100,000, then there is almost no way that this can be true. And given that this sort of mobility is not actually the pattern, it is even less plausible.

A much better discussion is available over at Dean Baker's blog, who also points that the only way this could be true is if (1) we're talking about households rather than "sixty percent of Americans", and (cause this alone doesn't get you anywhere near there) (2) there is a remarkable and unrealistic amount of income variation. More importantly, he also notes (3) that by the logic required for this to make any sense (households and unrealistic variance assumptions), the situation is pretty bad for the bottom levels of income distribution.

But, let's take the flip side. There were roughly 29 million households that had incomes of less than $25,000 in 2008. If we assume 1.2 adults in these households on average, then there were roughly the same number of adults living in households with incomes under $25,000 as there were living in households with incomes above $100,000. Now, if we assume the same mobility around the bottom as around the top, then 60 percent of adults lived in a household that made less than $25,000 in at least 1 or 2 of the last ten years. And 40 percent of adults had incomes this low for at least 4 of the last ten years.

Augusta National Golf Club.... still clueless

That the Chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, which still(!) refuses to allow women members, and which still basks in its obnoxious old boys club exclusivity, would "rebuke" Tiger Woods, and more specifically, say Tiger "disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids," is pretty absurd.


Cause the bitter maintenance of antiquated exclusionary policies that were always unjust in the first place is certainly the sort of value that I want my children's role models to be espousing.


If Tiger Woods were to say "I never said I was a role model," I'd say sure, but you certainly hawked yourself like you were one, cashed in on being one, and in the end highlighted some degrading and selfish priorities. but he didn't say that; he denied, he obfuscated, and then he took some responsibility (although the speed with which he's back suggests that he didn't really see this as anything more than a career hiccup).


But for the president of a sexist and discriminatory oasis for the coddled, insulated, and pampered elite to suggest that Tiger Woods should have been a better role model is laughable. I'd rather my children screwed up in their private lives than became the public spokesperson for sexism, exclusion, and elitism. But I'd rather both Woods and Payne stopped being dicks, Woods in his private life and Payne in his public role. 

On Welfare... or at least on discretionary and complicated cash payments to poor who jump through hoops

interesting idea. But I like the fact that they thought " holding down a full-time job" with a cash incentive of $150 a month was going to do the trick. Presumably there is already a cash incentive to having a full time job, and this would have subsidized those who already had jobs (which I'm fine with) but do absolutely nothing about creating more jobs. 

But it's very telling about what they think is at root in poverty: 25$ is not going to get anyone to attend school unless there is absolutely no good reason why they aren't in school already. It's a tiny push at the margins, implying that maybe when they designed the program they believed that the reason for truancy was just a tiny marginal preference for not going. 

Times when I agree with Nixon

It does happen

Nixon later confirmed this report of his attitudes toward social workers when he wrote in his memoirs of how he "abhorred snoopy, patronizing surveillance by social workers which made children and adults on welfare feel stigmatized and separate. The basic premise of the Family Assistance Plan was simple: what the poor need to help them rise out of poverty is money."

 From "Responding to the New Dependency: The Family Assistance Plan of  1969" by David A. Rochefort, in Critchlow & Hawley, Poverty and Public Policy in Modern America, p.293.

The FAP, however, was woefully deficient (total of $2,000 a year for a family of four in 1970) and would have set a dangerous precedent, requiring recipients to accept jobs below the minimum wage. Leftist dilemma: take the deal and establish the principle that the federal government should provide all families with a basic level of income, but greatly undermining a core pillar of working class security, or reject the deal and risk losing the best and last opportunity for expanding and securing the direct welfare component of the welfare state.

I am more and more inclined to think that policy can be changed, but that principles establish parameters for political mobilization and for policy construction that are much more enduring.

Incentivizing the status quo

I think that Lamar Alexander revealed quite a bit when talking to the NY Times, both as to the broader Republican strategy and in regards to the incentives in favor of the status quo on an issue such as health care.

Mr. Alexander said Democrats would soon find themselves saddled with blame by Americans whenever they ran into a problem with an insurance company, even though Democrats have made a point of criticizing the insurance industry in the debate and asserting that without legislation the nation faced never-ending increases in premiums that would make health coverage less and less affordable.
“Insurance premiums are going to go up normally, and millions of Americans are going to experience higher premiums,” Mr. Alexander said. “All this is going to be coming, and the health care bill is going to get blamed for a lot of it.”

Alexander is almost certainly right in this. This was noted by Jonathan Bernstein as well: from now on, anything that happens in health care will be attributed to the Democrats and this bill. And given that a lot of the big-news items in health care are bad news (premium hikes especially), there will be ample fodder for Republican attacks.

This points to the broader incentives in favor of the status quo. The primary incentive for this bill, or more precisely, the incentive that was seen as being sell-able to the centrists Dems, independents, and maybe even some Republicans, was a potential future:* health care entitlements pushing out all other spending and leading to an unsustainable debt, premium hikes as costs increased well above inflation, leading healthy people to drop out of the system leading to more premium hikes, etc. That future remains, despite passage of this bill, plausible. It is less likely, and has gone from a near-certainty to one among many potential outcomes. But the judgements against this bill will likely be driven by a diachronic comparison between before the bill and after the bill, rather than between an actual trajectory and an avoided trajectory.

And given that in terms of cost control this bill is likely going to make things less worse less fast, rather than making things better in the short-term, this is not a particularly rosy comparison. It is the wrong comparison to make, but it is an intuitive one, and one that I expect we'll be seeing a lot of.

Surprisingly helpful GOP banner ad

Was wondering what time the vote was going to be today. Luckily, the GOP has me covered.

who to watch

Update: Kaptur is a yes.  This good news, however, is tempered by the fact that Loretta Sanchez, a former yes who wasn't on most lists of undecided dems has gone AWOL. Missing votes only help the dems if they were otherwise going to vote no, and then you would need two missing to get it down to 215 votes. 


Kaptur's decision apparently comes after the Stupak bloc met with the White House and Secretary Sebelius and got assurances that there would be some effort to ensure that existing abortion law is maintained. That will likely be in the form of an executive order applying the Hyde Amendment to the exchanges, which pretty much all sides in the abortion debate say they want. I will write later on why I think that Stupak and the Catholic Bishops knew that the Senate bill didn't change existing law of no federal funding for abortions, and were pressing for a much greater change to abortion coverage than they were admitting. But for now the big question becomes "whether this means more members of the Stupak coalition will follow suit. By some estimates a half dozen of them are still undecided, so if they break towards Yes, it could put House Dem vote counters over the top."

If you are watching the vote today, then which legislators should you be watching for?

I've found the NY Times graphic to be helpful, even if there are better and more up-to-date whip counts out there.

As of 10am this morning, it listed the Dems as needing 9 votes. Word is though that Henry Cuellar is a yes, so I take him out of the tally and list the Dems as needing 8 votes.


My sense of who to watch will be:
1) Brian Baird (He was a No last time, but he is a necessary get for the leadership)
2) Kathy Dahlkemper (possible Stupak-bloc)
3) Daniel Lipinski (almost certain Stupak-bloc... I would put him as a likely no, but if they got him then I suspect that there wouldn't be much cohesion left in the Stupak group)
4) Marcy Kaptur (Again, a Stupakite, but one that has been heavily courted by the leadership, with extended meetings by Pelosi throughout the last two days)


These won't get them to 216. But if they can't peel off some of the Stupak group then they won't be able to get there, and if they can't get Baird (who has no excuse to vote no) then that suggests that the leadership's strong-arm isn't up to the task. 


Additionally, I'm not at all convinced that Lynch will vote against it. He would get the firedoglake-left support for being an opponent from the left, but he would almost certainly lose his leadership position as a floor whip (unless Pelosi has the votes and is giving him a pass--and it would be pretty shocking if Pelosi were giving the leadership a pass) and probably lead to coldness if not direct opposition from unions.

Mammalian Regeneration

Sometimes I just use this page to bookmark things that I enjoyed reading, or found interesting in some ways, and want to be able to find fairly easily.

This one concerns the possibility of mammalian regeneration. I've always thought how lucky lizards were in this capacity, and now it turns out that we (or at least mice) lack this ability due to a single gene, one that can be knocked out.

The Party Line

Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Texas)

Rep. Chet Edwards, a Texas Democrat who remains a firm “no,” said he’s getting calls spurred by Organizing for America, the president’s unofficial outreach arm. He said he’s fine with constituents expressing their opinions — and even with the right of OFA to engage — but noted of the Obama organization, “It’s clear to me they could care less about my political future.”

This is absolutely true. I wonder though, does Mr. Edwards think it should be any other way? Politicians should care about their political future, and constitutional designers should try to harness their likely concern with their continued lucrative employment in pursuit of broader political and social objectives. This was one of the key insights of the Federalist Papers after all (#54):

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

But by the same logic voters should absolutely be instrumental in their concern for the careers of politicians: they should avoid the sort of sentimentality that congressmen frequently try to instill, and they should be concerned with the career prospects of a politician only if this is related in some tangible way to the success of their preferred policies. If Chet Edwards is willing to see the one consistent and dominant priority of the Democratic party go down in flames, at a time when passage is so close and failure is almost certainly going to lead to the return to power of an emboldened right wing, then absolutely Democrats shouldn't give a damn about his political future.

He doesn't even need to be the most reliable vote for him to be worth the Democrats' while: he can vote against them on all but the big bills and still be worth more than a Republican in that seat. But if he won't vote when it counts, then I see little value added from having a Democrat rather than a Republican in that seat.

This though raises the broader question: isn't toeing the party line an undesirable quality in a representative? in some cases absolutely. And if Chet Edwards really believes that this bill violates his conscience or the broad interests of his constituents, then he should absolutely vote against it. But then he should stand on that principle, rather than whine about how Democrats don't care about his political future.

More broadly, however, the aggregation of distinct district preferences in such a large and homogeneous country will always be highly problematic and unstable unless it is embedded within a larger institutional framework, such as a party system. It might not be ideal, we might want more parties or some other arrangement altogether, but given that we have chosen a two-party system (both by votes and by the various legal impediments to additional parties) to structure the aggregation of preferences, I don't have too much of a problem with requiring party members to stand up and be counted for the major policies advanced by the party. When they don't, they should get ready for the party backlash. Because at least some measure of party discipline is necessary in order to get anything done.*

* I think that there is an important difference between taking a position based on principle and based on short term calculations of electoral expediency. I think that having a robust and diverse body of principled legislators is an important thing, one that has all sorts of positive externalities on governance and policymaking. These positive benefits largely outweigh the negative, namely, the need to corral a bunch of self-interested bunnies. So I would be less willing to challenge principled opponents of a major party objective, as it is likely that their presence in the congressional delegation would enhance governance. But complaints of political blowback leave me absolutely unfazed. They want to keep their jobs, and so are willing to go against my policy preferences. I should be equally instrumental in seeing that they lose their jobs, or at least fear for their jobs, in order to achieve my policy preferences.

Health Care rolling on

I don't see this as terrible news

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

While it probably makes it harder for House Democrats who don't fully trust the Senate to follow through on its promise, and while it definitely will be highlighted by the GOP (who were the ones who asked for the ruling in the first place) to scare House Democrats, I think that it will ultimately do little to de-rail efforts to pass the Senate bill in the House, and might even make for better politics.

On the one hand, Reid has just sent a letter to the GOP leadership letting them know that he plans to proceed on reconciliation. This is a pretty big commitment, and I'd be blown away if he didn't go for it. More importantly, the Senate leadership and the Administration have promised the House that they would move forward on this through reconciliation--if they screwed House Democrats now they would have lost all chance of getting any more legislation through this Congress. And, as Jonathan Bernstein has pointed out on numerous occasions, the reconciliation fix would be "ice cream and very little spinach." That is, it would be all the good stuff everyone wants to be on record for voting for.

As for the politics, I have been making the argument for a while that the best way to dampen the noise about procedural concerns with reconciliation would be to pass the Senate bill first. The headlines dominate the news cycle, the President gives speeches about how it's been a century in the making. And even the most clueless of reporters will have gotten it through their heads that what is being passed through reconciliation isn't the bill, but a small series of popular amendments. This ruling from the Parliamentarian doesn't change that dynamic, and in fact only enhances it. Next to the historic passage of health care, reconciliation becomes an afterthought.

All that said, it still might make it harder for skittish House Dems, and the skittishness of these particular ponies should never be underestimated.

air cover

The left has got to have the slowest moving machine ever.

We've heard promises that the unions are going to be running ads targeting vulnerable Dems, both encouraging them to vote for it, thanking them if they do, and challenging them in primaries if they do not. The DNC has put out an ad attacking the GOP, but not one that really provides targeted support to vulnerable Democrats who are being blitzed in their districts by the Republican's "Code Red" strategy.

And finally, today, MoveOn has decided to join the fray.

Member survey on the health care bill

**RESULTS: 83% support, 17% oppose**

Meaning presumably, in the next couple of days, they are going to start preparing ads, running ads, organizing phone banks, etc. Organizing for America has been doing similar work, but at a much reduced pace from last year, or hell even from January and February.

So these reassurances that I hear about how there will be air cover, even enough to match the $10 million that the Chamber of Commerce, insurance groups, and others will be spending opposing health care, leave me somewhat skeptical. When will we see them? This weekend? Next week?

It feels like watching the Tsarist Russian army trying to mobilize: the slowly-grinding gears that will, sometime by this summer, finally be ready to combat the Prussian onslaught. Hell by that point the GOP might have already taken France.

So while the left has definitely improved its overall infrastructure since 2006, we're still no match for the organized right.

The class which does not want to be named....

....always falls prey to its central weakness, its own vanity.

A friend tells me about new luxury condo developments in Philadelphia. Apparently, a cutting edge technique for building developers catering to the now middle-ageing children of the old main line bourgeoisie is for new condos to not be placed on the open market. Rather, you may purchase one of these luxury abodes by invitation only. It is called the 'Friends and Family' plan, and the purpose is to whip up interest amongst our always competitive and tight-knit social betters. Not only does it ensure an even more homogeneous 'neighborhood' than would have been achieved through the exorbitant price tag alone, but it has that lovely ring of exclusivity for which many will pay top dollar. After all, only a select few are able to even see the homes, let alone make an offer.

This is all very absurd, for numerous reasons. I also hope (but somewhat doubt) that this would be in violation of various state and federal fair housing laws. I am pretty sure the 1968 Civil Rights Act saw these sorts of faux-private arrangements (they are, after all, being organized by building developers who presumably aren't covered by the 'room to let' exemptions) as a not-too subtle run around against fair housing, and sought to have them outlawed.

This is not to suggest that the developers are trying to maintain 'a certain type of neighborhood.' In fact I suspect that if suitably bougie and networked African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, or what have you were to receive the special invite and make an offer, that the developers would love to have them. Our new 21st exclusivity is so much more tolerant than our old 20th century exclusivity. The point, rather, is that the developers see this as an excellent way to raise the prices on units that they would have been marketing to this crowd regardless.

There is always money to be made on the vanity of the bourgeoisie.

dissertation tribulations

I wonder if this is a common experience. Certainly I suspect it is a troubling sign.

The more I meet with my committee, and the more drafts I send them for comments and feedback, the less I am able to coherently talk about my research.

It hasn't always been this way, and I hope that this recent trend will abate sooner rather than later. But it is worrying, and I think it points to some underlying confusion (between I and I? between I and They?) that has not yet been noticed, and accordingly, not yet resolved.