Jedediah Purdy: All Publications, Events and Press

'A Tolerable Anarchy' by Jedediah Purdy | Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:50:00 -0400

For help in understanding the process that has brought us to this impasse we have Jedediah Purdy's compact discourse on how Americans have considered the meaning of freedom since 1776. Purdy, a professor of law at Duke University, ...

CANCELLED: A Conversation with Jedediah Purdy

Stephanie Gunter — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 17:30:00 -0400

A New America Event
03/25/2009 - 6:00pm

MARCH 25: This event has been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience, and encourage you to attend Jedediah Purdy's reading and discussion tomorrow, March 26, at Politics and Prose:

A Tolerable Anarchy

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:16:00 -0400

Freedom is at the heart of the American identity, shaping both personal lives and political values. The ideal of authoring one's own life has inspired the country's best and worst moments--courage and emancipation, but also fear, delusion, and pointless war.

The Future of Liberalism | New York Times

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:09:00 -0400

For his part, Jedediah Purdy creates an idea-packed sandwich in “A Tolerable Anarchy”: first a slice of radical American autonomy, which frightened both Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke (unnecessarily); then a slice of practical constraint on that autonomy, produced by Mother Nature herself in the form of a warming climate; and in between, a tour of American political history as it relates to the essence of freedom in different eras. This tour of freedom and its discontents passes through slavery and race, property and labor, conflict and war, utopias and morality.

'A Tolerable Anarchy' and 'The Myth of American Exceptionalism' | Los Angeles Times

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 17:41:00 -0400

In his 2003 book "Being America," Jedediah Purdy remarked that at "the same time we disclaim imperial aspirations, we Americans suspect that we are the world's universal nation." Without using the term, he was raising the question of ...

Law Prof Examines Freedom and Obama’s Appeal in New Book | American Bar Association Journal

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:13:00 -0400

“I was trying to figure out what was appealing to me about it," the professor, Jedediah Purdy, now a visiting law professor at Yale...

Book Review: A Tolerable Anarchy | Christian Science Monitor

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:10:00 -0400

That’s the view Jedediah Purdy offers in A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom, his erudite, topical, thought-provoking exploration of the history of what it means to be free in America. ...

Today's Crisis Offers a Transformational Opportunity | The Independent Weekly

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:55:00 -0400

Book Review of A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom by Jedediah Purdy. Thank God for Bernie Madoff. Without him, who would be the face of the Great Collapse of 2008? Before "the Ponz" pled guilty to running what is surely the biggest investor scam in American history, wrote Chadwick Matlin last week in a ...

The Coast of Utopia

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:19:00 -0500

William H. Goetzmann believes America at its best embodies what he calls "cosmotopian ideals": the United States is a global civilization where all human ideas and experiences mingle. Cosmotopia is the polestar of his strange and valuable book. "Beyond the Revolution" is scornful of regionalists, traditionalists and anyone else who would restrict the scope of American identity. It is richly populated with radicals and utopians who, with one eye on the innermost soul and the other on world history, created a tradition of open-ended experiment. Like many books

Drowning in Lawyers

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:34:00 -0400

The US Senate judiciary committee has drawn a line in the water -- and is holding it. Before the committee's Democrats approve Michael Mukasey's nomination for attorney general, they want to know that he believes waterboarding is torture under United States law. Simulating drowning to get terrified detainees to speak, a favourite technique of the Khmer Rouge, strikes many as a paradigm of torture. If it isn't torture, what does the word mean?

This is about more than a terrible practice. It's about the integrity of the elite lawyers who assess the president's power -- who answer to the attorney general. We recently learned that at the end of 2005, while Congress was preparing to pass a ban on "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners, those lawyers were crafting secret opinions holding that none of the CIA's interrogation techniques violated that standard. The memos remain secret -- itself a serious problem for the rule of law -- but they seem to have been classic legerdemain, playing with definitions to rob words of their meaning. Any first-year law student learns how to do this. At some point, she also learns that, although the trick is easy to do, personal and professional integrity make it inappropriate, especially for a government lawyer assigned to say what the law means. The political loyalty that the Bush administration demands evidently overrode that standard, just as it overrode the longstanding justice department practice of not firing federal prosecutors in the middle of their terms for showing insufficient partisan zeal. This administration sometimes seems to treat law the way a tax-dodging corporation does, as nothing but an obstacle to its goals.

Elite lawyers are not exactly poster-children for a human-rights campaign. This administration is often contemptuous of professionals, with their refined training and esoteric norms. That isn't a hard attitude to cop. Lots of Americans already believe the same, and many lawyers at least halfway believe it about themselves.

But really believing that would be poisonous. If there are to be meaningful limits on power, those who interpret and apply the law must treat it as a constraint that defines what they do, not just a cluster of impediments to their righteous goals. Otherwise, nearly anything is justifiable. To stay away from that grim result, advisers to power, and those who exercise it, need to honour limits. As the president said in his second inaugural address, self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.

It's a safe bet that he didn't mean lawyers, particularly his lawyers. But his phrase is telling, coming from a president who counts personal virtue and unchecked executive power among his favourite things. It's an old conservative idea, most famously associated with Edmund Burke, that traditional virtue is the best form of prudence. You should be reluctant to discard a taboo because you never know what else might turn out to depend on it.

The Bush administration sometimes embraces this Burkean idea. The president ran in 2004 on his opposition to same-sex marriage, arguing that social stability and personal responsibility depended on "traditional" marriage. Back when he was obsessed with cloning and stem cells, Bush chose as bioethics czar Leon Kass, a medical doctor who believes biotechnology turns the life into a plaything of human desire, denying us the constraint and suffering that produce moral maturity. Without the old limits, this view goes, there is only the freedom to harm others and degrade ourselves.

Unlike some things Burke thought -- for instance, that invading and trying to govern a faraway country is often bad for occupier and occupied alike - this conservative idea is usually wrong. If the last few centuries prove anything, it is that humanity is flexible and resilient. Conservative preachers in the first decades of American independence argued that the country was on the verge of collapse from an excess of freedom, evidenced by public swearing, drinking and traveling on the Sabbath. A few decades later, southern traditionalists argued that slavery was the last thing standing between the United States and moral collapse. Then the threat was women's emancipation. And so forth. These days, the argument is hard to make with a straight face. There's plenty wrong with Britney Spears, but she doesn't portend the end of civilisation.

There is, however, one place where Burke's idea is an extremely good one, because there freedom depends on fixed limits. This is the use of political power against individuals. Ironically, that's where the administration has been most willing to discard old limits. There are many familiar examples: torture, defiance of federal criminal law (which barred warrantless domestic surveillance when the White House began its secret monitoring program), holding prisoners indefinitely without due process. But something subtler is being eroded in all these abuses: the professional integrity that undergirds the rule of law. Unlike more specific wrongs, this cannot be undone with the stroke of a pen. A classic Burkean wound to the body politic, it may take years of patient labor to restore, and past a point it might be irremediable. Asking judge Mukasey to draw a line is a way of asking a whole profession to do the right thing.

While free society doesn't depend on chastity, opposite-sex weddings or patient acceptance of genetic defects, it does require that those most intimately responsible for law take it seriously. Otherwise, where it counts most, there will only be power -- to harm others and degrade ourselves. An administration that thinks sex is morality but law is only power has got self-government ass-backwards.

Can't Talk the Talk

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:28:00 -0400

One of the standard complaints about Hillary Clinton's candidacy is that she reminds everyone of 15 years of partisan anger. Like Pavlov's bells, the story goes, she starts Americans salivating over mental maps of red and blue. There's something to that. Many Bush supporters loathed both Clintons, and liberals have amply returned the sentiment since 2000.

But bitter partisan division isn't a genetic disorder of the country's two dynastic houses, the hemophilia of 21st-century American politics. Something else links the Clintons and Bushes, and it's a basic problem for anyone who wants to be the next president: they share an exhausted political language, with no way of talking about the dignity of citizenship or the common good. The hatred is partly a substitute for lack of more important things to fight over.

If a political scientist from Alpha Centauri dropped in to observe us, he might conclude that Americans share a broad moral consensus and have no idea what to do with their government. Exhibit one would be the major speeches of Bill Clinton and George Bush. Their central passages might have spoken by the same person. Who called on his listeners "to break the bad habit of expecting something for nothing, from our government or from each other," and time to "all take more responsibility, not only for ourselves and our families but for our communities and our country"? It was Clinton, in his first inaugural address. Seven years later Bush promised a "responsibility era." Both presidents built their speeches on a catalog of personal virtues: service, character, commitment, responsibility. Both called on Americans to recognize that we are all in this together. Clinton's "simple but powerful truth [that] we need each other [a]nd we must care for one another" found its answer in Bush's "liberty for all does not mean independence from one another." Both pronounced "community" like a sacred word.

We are all in this together. The problem is that, if you're president -- or choosing a president -- that isn't the question you're trying to answer. The question is how government can respond to the fact that we need one another, and what citizenship has to do with our duties and rights. The Clinton-Bush language is all about personal and social virtue, the qualities that make a good neighbour or parent. It stops at the gates of government and power, which is where the president's responsibility begins.

This way of talking about politics is fairly new. Richard Nixon introduced "responsibility" as a major presidential theme while taking swipes at Great Society ambition and largesse. A lot of this language is an elaboration on George HW Bush's calls for a "kinder" American lit up by a "thousand points of light," each marking some act of service. The senior Bush was trying to recover what you might call a sense of decency from Ronald Reagan's praise of standing tall and getting rich.

Before all that, presidential language was political language. "Service" and "responsibility" referred to the duties of the office. "Community" was not a moral term. "Virtue," that old word which recent presidents mean although they don't say it, meant civic virtue, not personal goodness.

That doesn't mean that American politics has spent much time in a golden era. Lots of political visions have been shoddy, like Grover Cleveland's defence of laissez-faire capitalism as the heart of liberty, or disastrous, like Teddy Roosevelt's praise of a bloody American nation-building project conducted in the teeth of a tribal and Muslim insurgency. (No, that was the Philippines.) It does mean, though, that our political language is a new kind of cop-out. Bush's one major effort, his wish to be a "war president," says nothing about the lives of most citizens except that, when political questions arise, they should defer to their leaders and not ask hard questions.

Political language tells people what, if anything, government has to do with the things that palpably matter in their lives: safety, opportunity, personal freedom, duty. It connects citizenship with dignity. It ties personal existence to a national story and suggests how each can contribute to the other. Major reforms, important projects, re-aligning partisan divides are all that much harder without a language that can make these connections.

When political vision is basically personal, it's no surprise that people love and hate presidents -- and other partisans -- in personalized ways. That's what marked the politics of the 1990s and the Bush years except for the war: triviality veined with hatred, futility inflated by platitudes. Yes, Hillary will remind us of this. So will any candidate who can't do better. It is, unfortunately, what we are now in together.

The New Open Society

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 04:48:00 -0500

Internet utopianism can seem so 1998. The future was silicon in the late Clinton years, when government was flatlining in petty scandal and technology stocks seemed to rise exponentially. Not only was anything possible: If you believed the mavens of Wired magazine and assorted other cyber-prophets, pretty much anything was inevitable. Soon, they assured us, people would spend more time in virtual communities than in "meatspace." Politics would be transformed by the universal pamphleteering of Netizens. Oh, and some of us would go all the way and upload our consciousness into mainframes to live forever as data. The new world might or might not be brave, but it was certainly weird.

The future has not quite lived up to its billing, which is what Cass Sunstein would have expected. Sunstein, a polymath law professor at the University of Chicago, responded to some of these wide-eyed forecasts in his 2002 book, Republic.com, in which he argued that the Internet polarized politics and fragmented cultural life by creating echo chambers of the loud and likeminded: partisan media, howling blogs, and news selected to reinforce solipsism and narcissism -- "the Daily Me." In Infotopia he has followed up that skeptical broadside with a survey of the evidence on how information technology affects political debate and institutional decision making. The result is a vivid, readable, and informative work of empiricist skepticism -- a show-me-the-money guide to what soars and what stumbles from the stable of Internet dreams.

Yochai Benkler, who teaches law at Yale, has written a very different book. The Wealth of Networks is Internet utopianism for grown-ups. Benkler’s sprawling argument sums up years of work on the economics, sociology, and politics of information technology. He is interested in the world that exists mostly for what it shows about what might be -- a charitable definition of the utopian temper. His book is one part introduction to a vast and rapidly growing field of technology, economics, and law, and one part an object lesson in the place of utopian hopes in mature liberal thought. Benkler makes a strong case that we disown utopianism at our peril. In making that argument, he develops a liberal and realistic version of utopian thinking that avoids some of the hazards of the approach.

The scope of Sunstein’s book is narrower than its sweeping title might suggest. His theme is twofold: the fact that valuable information is dispersed among many different people and the problem of how to combine it to make it useful. His starting point is the Jury Theorem, a mathematical proof that originated with the 18th-century philosopher Condorcet. The theorem envisions a group, such as a jury, trying to answer a question. Condorcet showed that if each member of the group is more likely to have the right answer than a wrong one -- even only very slightly more likely -- than in a group vote, the majority is quite likely to reach the right answer. As the size of the group grows, the likelihood of a right answer approaches a mathematical certainty. The same results hold even if some members are likely to be wrong, so long as the rest are a little more likely to be right. In short, groups are much smarter than their members, even their very smart members. A vote by any group of people not basically ignorant or confused is a mathematically reliable machine for generating right answers.

So, why don’t we vote on everything? For one thing, lots of people turn out to be ignorant or confused about lots of things. And, dismayingly, the Jury Theorem works in reverse. If individuals are overall more likely to be wrong than right, as the size of the group grows a wrong answer from a majority vote approaches mathematical certainty. The challenge, then, is to find a way of bringing together dispersed information that sorts good information from bad, instead of just amplifying it as voting does.

There are two basic strategies for gathering and sifting dispersed information, and both have inspired some Internet utopianism. The first is markets: Markets "set" prices and production levels by taking account of the preferences of hundreds of millions of otherwise unconnected individuals, expressed purely in decisions to pay or not to pay a particular price. This is better than, say, voting on production levels, not just because voting would be complex, but also because market signals are particularly reliable expressions of preferences precisely because money is at stake. It’s cheap to say that you’d like to see more Lamborghinis produced, as many 19-year-old male voters likely would if asked. It’s another thing to pony up the purchase price.

"Prediction markets" attempt to apply these virtues of markets to gathering other kinds of information. Participants in prediction markets bet on questions as various as whether (and when) there will be another terrorist attack in the United States, who will be the next president, and (in an internal market organized among Microsoft employees) when a new product will be ready for launch. The rules of the markets vary, but the basic idea is that participants win big if they are right and (in most cases) lose something if they are wrong. Moreover, they can generally choose the size of their bet, depending how likely they think they are to be right. Markets can therefore elicit and amplify good information and silence (by punishing) bad information. Results for presidential elections have been closer to the actual result than most polls, and Microsoft has accurately reset launch dates by months as internal prediction markets revealed that announced targets were unrealistic. But, of course, markets are subject to speculative bubbles and frenzies: Imagine setting anti-terrorism policy on the public-policy equivalent of the 1998 NASDAQ.

The other basic model, much beloved of some reformers and political theorists, is deliberation: drawing out everyone’s information through dialogue as a group presses toward a decision. Here Sunstein is a skeptic. In some experiments, deliberating groups do worse at solving problems than groups that vote blind. In others, they do worse than the best-informed members would do by themselves. Clearly the best information does not reliably get recognized. Groupthink seems to be the culprit. Sometimes people defer to charismatic or outspoken group members or to the perceived drift of the group, even to the point of withholding valuable information rather than mark themselves as dissenters. Sometimes the group emphasizes information everyone has -- redundant information -- which looms large simply because everyone knows it, and so eclipses important information that just one or two members have. All this is a reminder of why the secret ballot was such an important reform in 19th-century America: Social pressure can override individual judgment for reasons unrelated to the merits of the question. Sunstein spends time discussing blogs and other new forms of Internet-based political debate, and finds them analogous to formal deliberating groups: The groups sometimes elicit important information and reach good judgments, and sometimes produce bullies and mobs.

There is no panacea, so the trick is to build a better megabyte trap. For prediction markets, enlist people likely to have information about problems that involve both a lot of uncertainty and a lot of relevant, dispersed information. Avoid wildly speculative topics like major terrorist attacks. For deliberation, set up rules that encourage people to share all the information they have and try to neutralize social advantages from outside -- say, by assigning participants advocacy roles in the debate. Deliberate over technical problems, where the right answer will become clear when someone generates it, rather than over more speculative issues, where groupthink can override the merits. (Of course, this is why we have civil engineers for technical problems and encyclopedias for disputes of fact, which leaves a little unclear where deliberation should make its contribution.)

Yochai Benkler argues that information technology can change not just some of our decision making, but everything we do. His most innovative argument is about economic life. He claims that the capital requirements of producing industrial-age goods pressed production into centralized, hierarchical systems, whether governments or firms. The cheapness and power of information technology, however, mean that in areas such as film, music, publishing, and information processing, those vast capital concentrations are no longer necessary. Anyone with some gadgets and the right software can do something surprisingly close to what recently required a huge infrastructure in Hollywood, Manhattan, or Nashville.

In remixes, mash-ups, and online volunteer projects such as mapping the terrain of Mars from fragmented satellite images, people are becoming makers as well as consumers. Sometimes they produce idiosyncratic but vivid -- or tedious -- stuff. At other times they produce real value, as with open-source software, the codes maintained by a loose network of volunteers and part-timers who power much of the world’s information processing.

"Everyone a Creator" seems to be Benkler’s first slogan for an economy based on cheap and powerful information technology. The second is "Share Nicely." Just as we can now make valuable -- or at least entertaining -- stuff in our spare time, we can share it almost costlessly with whomever might be interested or link it up with someone else’s similarly quirky project. The new universe of free downloads is one instance of sharing, from Web-based music distribution centers to "YouTube." A phenomenon that unites voluntary production with open access is "Wikipedia," a free, open-source online encyclopedia, which at the time of writing has more than 1.3 million English-language articles written "collaboratively by its readers," most with an interest or expertise they burn to share. Wikipedia is sometimes lampooned for here-and-there factual errors (the satirical Onion recently reported the Wikipedians’ celebration of the 750th anniversary of American independence, which made the United States "212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven"), but it is nonetheless both a useful resource and a terrific achievement. Such sharing is normal among family and friends, particularly when we have something we can hand over without losing much ourselves. What is new is both the quantity of stuff that costs nothing to share and access to billions of people who might be interested in it.

Benkler believes voluntary production, often tied to sharing, is emerging as a major mode of economic life, alongside markets and hierarchically organized production. He has enough examples to prove it in entertainment and some elite technological sectors. So, why should anyone else care? First, Benkler argues, because it is intrinsically good to be able to use more of your capabilities -- to create and share as well as make a living, or even to make a living partly by creating and sharing. Second, improved technologies for sharing valuable information could spur scientific research as they already have software production and culture. Schemes are afoot to "open source" large segments of basic scientific knowledge to facilitate research on neglected diseases and other problems that markets neglect because they mainly affect the world’s poor. If they succeed, these models could reduce the cost of important biomedical, pharmaceutical, and other research without compromising the basic integrity of the patent system that fosters innovation. Third, the kinds of people who habitually revise, comment on, and add to their cultural setting may be more critical and engaged citizens, if competence, initiative, and collaboration in cultural life affect the way people engage in politics.

Benkler is no technological determinist. He argues that new forms of production can grow beyond their elite and eccentric ghettos, but that they need our help. Law and policy can facilitate new forms of production and sharing or they can get in the way, as the expansion and strengthening of copyright law has done in the last 15 years. And that, the argument goes, is precisely why we need thinkers who contemplate the outermost possibilities of new technologies, even if their forecasts sometimes go awry. Those forecasts aren’t mere predictions, but proposals about what might be if people choose to pursue it. What the prophets of 1998 missed was that sometimes technology ensures only the opportunity for positive change. The rest is up to the political imagination, where Benkler’s visionary enthusiasm and Sunstein’s skeptical caution belong together.

The Legacy of Sept. 11... So Far

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 17:23:00 -0400

I was in Washington, lingering in that immortally perfect fall weather as I walked to work. A friend from Boston called my cell to tell me "not to go near anything." Then I saw that half the people I passed didn’t know, and were blithely planning dinners and video rentals. The other half had blanks for eyes. Two blocks later, I hit a store window with a television, just beginning to replay the image that would never go away.

Everyone has a story like that, many of them full of danger and loss. But the feeling that the world changed that morning was a mistake, a natural projection of overwhelming personal feeling. Instant prophecies foretold the death of irony and the rise of a new national unity. But everyday life is persistent, political venality is rational, and irony can be a tonic for both. Between them, Karl Rove and Jon Stewart soon laid the prophecies to rest.

What did change was the potential of politics. In the 1990s, government flatlined in scandal and trivia, and all the action was in money and technology. Sept. 11 brought a sense of danger that made politics urgent again. Leaders could try things that would have been impossible before the attacks. They did. The real legacy of Sept. 11 is five years of bold mistakes that have narrowed our choices, made problems worse, and brought the national mood full circle from complacency to wounded cynicism.

Iraq, where Washington now hopes to snatch mere failure from the jaws of total catastrophe, is only the jewel in a fool’s crown. The deeper mistake is the conceit that fighting Islamic terrorism could guide American foreign policy. The power of that idea is rhetorical and, for those who need Tolkienesque clashes of good and evil, psychological. It is not strategic. Unlike the Cold War, this war gives no guidance on such problems as Chinese and Indian power, Latin American drift and unrest, or even the fate of Russia, let alone new problems such as climate change. Never mind whether terrorism should be the centerpiece of American foreign policy: it cannot be, and pretending otherwise for five years is a terrible waste of time.

At home, Republicans’ naked partisanship since Sept. 11 has birthed a doppelganger. Since President Bush opened his second term with an ill-starred plan to privatize Social Security, Democrats have practiced vulture politics, circling the dying beast while hardly moving a wing. Some reluctance to make nice is understandable among politicians who were all but called traitors for raising frank questions about Iraq, domestic surveillance, or growing executive power. What voters have cause to regret is not partisanship, but the absence of a clear Democratic alternative on any of these issues. It is as if, denied the chance to be a constructive opposition, Democrats have forgotten how.

But the trouble is deeper and more ironic. Democrats’ electoral appeal amounts implicitly to saying they would not have launched a failing war in Iraq, driven up deficits, or ignored FEMA and New Orleans until the two met in a grim embrace. Probably not. But, picking up at the end of a train of disasters, what do you do? Who has a proposal for Iraq that does not involve some blend of admitting failure and swallowing more bloodshed -- Iraqi, American, or both? Domestically, who can do something about the nearly 46 million Americans without health insurance, when the government has to dig itself out of debt -- probably without the economic boom that powered the fiscal recovery of the 1990s? If you were an opposition leader, what would you do but grab for power and hope solutions would follow?

This morass has produced, out of a moment of rare national unity, the farcical debate over whether American politics is bitterly divided. Some declare today’s partisan animosity unprecedented, while others point out that Americans are nearer agreement on most issues than at most times in history. This seeming paradox is what comes of disappointment without solutions. The country is politically divided, not least over the personality of the president. But it is not divided over anything that its politics, right now, can do much to repair.

The legacy of Sept. 11 is not something magically produced at the moment of the attacks, but what we have done in the space those terrible events opened. The national response to the attacks briefly renewed politics as something necessary and full of possibility. The waste we made of that moment is the legacy of the first five years.

Five Years After

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:48:00 -0400

The idea that everything changed on September 11, 2001, was always a conceit. It was a conceit not because it exaggerated the importance of the event, but, curiously, because it underestimated it. The attacks on New York and Washington, for all their terrible human cost, did not change much by themselves. They did, however, change the horizon of political possibility. The shock of that morning, followed by the endlessly repeated images of the collapsing towers and New York’s blasted downtown, shook the country from nearly a decade of complacency and gave politics a fresh urgency. A new sense of danger meant that political leaders could attempt things that would recently have been impossible. The five years since have been a time of confused, distracting, and destructive responses to real problems. Now our options are narrowed by mistakes that have made the problems worse and brought the national mood full circle from complacency about politics to wounded cynicism. It has been a terrible time, and we are only at the end of the beginning.

Prophecies came and went just after the attacks. Some commentators declared an end to irony, as if a reminder of mortality would dampen the charm of double meanings, sly commentary, and wry self-awareness. Others predicted a new martial mood, induced by awareness of perpetual threat. “We are all Israelis now,” wrote Martin Peretz, publisher of The New Republic, before the smoke had cleared over Wall Street. And, it is true, everything felt very serious in those weeks, many volunteers turned up at military recruiting stations after the attacks, and others canceled trips to New York, Washington, Los Angeles, even their local malls in the South and Midwest. But everyday life is persistent. The same citizens who lived more or less blithely through the daily threat of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War, and their children, soon began to feel safe again, and to act it. President Bush told people to go shopping while he prepared for war, and while it may have been a cynical decision not to ask much of the population, it was a canny one. Meanwhile the ironic spirit, which was decadent and unproductive in the 1990s, has taken a new vitality from Bush’s posturing and dissimulation, always irony’s great targets.

All prediction of a world magically made new quickly faded. The action was in politics, where the latitude to remake the world had suddenly widened, and the day fell to the swift and the bold. Politics is never written on a blank slate. Washington, like a nest of aristocratic lovers, crawls with jealous and thwarted characters waiting for someone to make a fatal misstep. When September 11 opened a new space, familiar agendas rushed to fill it. The USA PATRIOT Act, the notorious law passed just after the attacks, was a wish list of new powers for police and prosecutors, many of its items culled from proposed legislation drafted by members of Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice. The extraordinary claims of presidential power that Bush and his lawyers began to announce after September 11 also had a political pre-history, one far more prosaic than the echoes of Carl Schmitt’s jurisprudence suggested. Why, critics asked, did the White House feel compelled to claim inherent power to detain “enemy combatants” indefinitely and without meaningful trial, set its own standards for interrogation in the teeth of the Geneva Conventions and American legislation forbidding torture, and launch a massive program of domestic surveillance that sneaked around the procedures Congress had announced? After all, Republicans controlled every branch of government, and Congress would have given the President nearly anything he requested in the first two years after September 11. A good part of the reason lay in the 1970s, when Gerald Ford replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon and watched a wave of new legislation impose Congressional oversight on the president’s control of intelligence and law enforcement. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney served in that historically weak and embattled White House, and contemporaries say that they were determined to restore the authority of the presidency against congressional interference. Perhaps they realized that only a war could do it. In any event, when a war dropped in their laps, they knew what to do with it.

The greatest pre-existing agenda of all was the centerpiece of these troubled five years, the invasion of Iraq. Reportorial accounts of the run-up to the invasion make clear that Cheney and Bush drove the decision to take down Saddam Hussein, while the storied neoconservatives, with their visions of a new Middle East and special solicitude for Israel, served mostly as ideologists after the fact, filling out the rationale of a plan that was in motion within days of September 11. What we may never know is just how the two men understood a choice both were all too ready to make. Cheney is the temperamental opposite of Bill Clinton, a figure who prefers silence to self-revelation, whose dark charisma lies in understatement, and whose fascination with concealment ranges from his periodic disappearances into “an undisclosed location” to his famous declaration that the war on terror would be fought in shadows, an image that now seems a perverse hint of Abu Ghraib and the domestic surveillance program. Bush is Clinton’s intellectual opposite, a man whose chronic inability to explain himself suggests incapacity to understand himself, although his admirers take it as evidence of instinctive judgment too clear to require words. Both seem likely to die with their secrets, or their confusions.

II.

As an attempt to make sense of post-9/11 world, the Iraq invasion was the jewel in a fool’s crown. It became gospel around the White House and in conservative circles that the war on terror would be a new compass for American foreign policy, as the Cold War had been until 1989. But there is a fallacy in this idea. Addressing the threat from terrorists, which is real and probably growing, cannot orient American foreign policy in the way the Cold War did. Making a priority of counter-terrorism reveals nothing about how the United States should address the rise of India and China, two new powers that had integral, if often awkward, places in the Cold War map. It says nothing about how to address a newly restive Latin America, which Washington sometimes seems to have forgotten even as China builds trade and investment relations there, and little more about the humanitarian, public-health, and political crises of sub-Saharan Africa. It shows nothing about how to approach global warming, and, for that matter, it is almost useless in making sense of the American approach to that old Cold War rival, Russia, whose “war on terror” in the Caucasus is at best an opportunistic distraction from the real problem of a nuclear power fraught with authoritarian politics and social disintegration. Of course terrorism deserves much more attention than it received before September 11, but while the Cold War generated a global map of priorities, making such a map from an anti-terror campaign leaves vast tracts of terra nullius.

It is not that preventing terrorism should not be the centerpiece of American foreign policy, but that, if the country wants a serious foreign policy, it cannot be. The conceit that it could be focuses American attention overwhelmingly on the Muslim world and, especially, the Middle East and Central Asia. No matter how serious the problems in those regions, this is a distortion. The suggestion that terrorism should define foreign policy is moral and psychological, not strategic. Its keystone is self-definition by opposition to an enemy who rejects one’s own defining values. While some, especially skeptical Europeans, may find that kind of idea self-servingly stark and heroic, it is certainly intelligible on its own terms. What it cannot be is a substitute for a strategic vision of a changing world, which could guide a foreign policy.

III.

The Iraq war is the crucible of one of the most depressing features of post-9/11 American politics: the nearly total erosion of good-faith debate on both sides of the partisan divide. The blame for starting the decline lies with the Bush Administration. After September 11, Democrats strained to be conciliatory and collaborative, while almost from September 12, the White House suggested that anyone who questioned its agenda was disloyal. The Iraq War, in particular, was sold to the country and the world on the basis of supposedly irrefutable intelligence that turned out to be deceptively edited or manufactured. Officials as high-ranking as Secretary of State Colin Powell, who took the Administration’s case for war to the United Nations in the winter of 2003, were effectively deceived. From Bush on down, the Administration has studiedly declined to acknowledge that the premises of its war -- nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, a link to al Qaeda, an imminent threat to the United States -- turned out to be false. Those who were as much as called traitors because they asked for firmer proof before endorsing the invasion have been understandably reluctant to make nice now.

Since Bush began his second term in 2005 and rapidly fell in public esteem, the Democrats have practiced the politics of the vulture: patiently circling the dying prey. When Bush led off his second term with a proposal to privatize the national pension program, the Democrats stood still and let the initiative wither as people realized they prefer security to risk in their own retirement. Although that was a creditable tactic, all things considered, Democratic responses to the Administration on foreign policy and domestic security have not been much clearer or more forthright. There is little basis for saying what the Democrats would do to distinguish themselves from Bush, were they to take power in 2006 and 2008. There is no clear Democratic position on Iraq, on the Middle East, domestic surveillance, or, for that matter, on the neglected bigger problems of foreign and domestic policy. Perhaps for this reason, as Republicans have become abysmally unpopular, the Democrats have made few gains. It is almost as if, denied recognition as a constructive opposition party, they have forgotten how to be one.

The reality, however, is worse and more ironic. The Democrats’ electoral appeal amounts implicitly to saying that they would not have done what Bush has: embroil the country in a bloody, unpopular, and increasingly disastrous war; unwittingly boost Iran’s regional prospects; give economic and diplomatic openings to China and other potential rivals; drive up the national debt with massive tax cuts and runaway spending, which includes almost no long-term public investment; and lose billions of dollars to corruption and incompetence abroad while giving away natural resources to preferred industries at home. Probably they would not have. In hindsight, the Clinton Administration seems a model of prudence and probity. A Gore Administration would have neither slashed taxes nor invaded Iraq. It would probably not have staffed the Federal Emergency Management Agency with incompetents nor been indifferent to New Orleans’ suffering, and so would have avoided much of the Katrina disaster that left Bush with a permanent stain.

But now the problem is a different one, which already in 2004 limited John Kerry’s ability to define a clear and consistent alternative to the President: picking up at the end of a long train of disasters, what do you do? Neither pressing on in Iraq nor leaving the country to work out its own bloody and potentially Islamist future is attractive, and anyway the Bush Administration already owns the first. The counter-intuitive idea of increasing American presence by tens of thousands of troops and trying to shut down the insurgency, which some conservatives are now pushing, would probably be political suicide as a Democratic campaign proposal. In domestic policy, where the Democrats are supposed to be strongest, huge deficits will tie their hands for perhaps a generation. Bill Clinton rolled back Ronald Reagan’s deficits with the help of the largest economic boom in decades. Democrats are unlikely to strike on such a deus ex machina twice. In other words, they have little to say because there may not be much they can do. There is a lot of ruin in a country, but this administration is squandering that as fast as everything else.

This is probably part of the reason that efforts by serious, smart, and responsible thinkers to redefine a Democratic agenda -- and there have been many in the last two years -- strike a nostalgic note. Democrats should rediscover the humble strength of cold war liberalism, writes Peter Beinart of The New Republic. No, they should rediscover the language of the common good that was lost in the 1960s, replies Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect. It is hard to imagine journalists better qualified to make these arguments with intelligence and nuance. But in politics, the relevance of ideas is usually bounded by the limits of the possible, and in the near term those appear troublingly narrow. The trend among many Democratic strategists is to pure tactics - winning more votes than the Republicans, by all means available, and then turning to the problems of governing and ideas. That must be right, as far as it goes; but that is not very far. It is no help in winning votes to be unable to say why you want to govern, and doing without ideas is a bleak necessity that is hard to make into a pragmatic virtue.

All of this has produced a farcical debate over whether American politics is bitterly divided, with some blithely declaring today’s political animosity unprecedented while others point out that, in substance, Americans are nearer consensus on most issues than at most times in history. The fact is that a significant minority of Americans despise President Bush, while another minority retains a fierce personal loyalty to him and feels contempt for his critics. What may be a narrow plurality is simply troubled and disappointed. None of this translates into wide and articulate disagreement over the substance of politics, because the space for political action that swept open after September 11 has drawn tighter with each misjudgment. The country is politically divided; it is just not divided over anything that politics can do much to cure, beyond replacing this president with someone serious about governing, who is willing to make small gains in terribly restrictive circumstances.

That is not much of a prescription. The United States is a resilient country, and history is surprising by its nature, so the best guess is that some change in circumstances somewhere down the road will shift this unhappy situation. If we knew what that change will be, we would already have reached it. But since September 11, America has entered a series of worsening political problems to which politics has been unable to give adequate answers. Here at the end of the beginning, there is not much good news.

The New Biopolitics

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 22:20:00 -0400

Will globalization destroy itself? Every few years, another crisis suggests it might. The Internet, satellite phones, and intercontinental air travel help terrorists cross the world in an instant. The global spread of democracy shakes authoritarian governments -- and opens the way for Islamists in Tehran and Cairo, a populist strongman in Venezuela, and nuke-happy nationalists in New Delhi. Open capital markets wreck the economies of Southeast Asia. Divisions between Muslim immigrants and the rest of Europe explode in French riots and Dutch assassinations.

These unhappy stories are familiar by now. An open, mobile, interconnected world creates new threats, or amplifies familiar ones, and countries throw up new borders in self-defense. The uncertainties of political and personal freedom make invented traditions seductive: pure Islamic states, India for the Hindus, premodern idylls available for free download.

But, along with electronic commerce, transnational fanaticism, and increasingly fluid borders, there is a missing piece in the current picture of globalization, one that puts the familiar paradoxes in a new light: biopolitics, the politics of human life and reproduction. Around the world, people are taking control of childbearing in new ways, which could produce serious consequences for global politics. In Europe, Russia, Japan, and South Korea, women are having too few children to sustain the current population. A shrinking workforce means too few taxpayers to support the next generation of retirees. The only obvious solution is greatly expanded immigration -- which, recall, is already the source of riots, xenophobia, and deep political anxiety. All this threatens a perfect political storm of bankrupt welfare states, struggles over immigration, and crises of national identity. Meanwhile, in India, China, Taiwan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, a very different problem is growing. Abortion of female fetuses, along with other causes, has produced a population with roughly 100 million more men than women -- men who are a prime constituency of extremist political movements in that volatile part of the world.

The demographic crises of globalization express a deep, troubling question. The crises emerge from hundreds of millions of free choices that earlier generations could not make: whether and when to bear children, and which children to bear. In other words, the two demographic crises express a dramatic new form of freedom, part of the unprecedented control people have gained over their lives in the several centuries of the liberal, modern experiment. The question is whether we have gained more freedom than we can handle. Liberal modernity is all about expanding human freedom, not so much in the mystic chords of George W. Bush's foreign-policy speeches as in the expanding realm of personal choice. Communication and mobility make traditions optional, not mandatory -- by moving, or just watching and listening and mimicking, people decide who they will be as never before in history. And, as ideas and desires expand, technology increases our power to make wishes come true: hopping around the world, meeting a partner from another continent, choosing the most promising of a dozen embryos or 3,000 sperm donors. None of this has to be forced on us; people run headlong toward every one of these new choices.

Technology, with the liberal international economy that ensures its rapid spread, has made all this possible. But technology doesn't care whether you use it for an anti-landmine campaign or to wreck world climate and vaporize a neighboring country. It is as benign or destructive as the wishes it makes true. And free choice often turns out to be more choice than people want. Modern democracy is the great marketplace of easy answers to hard questions: nationalism, fundamentalism, and any other halfway believable story about how the world makes more sense than in fact it does. Critics of freedom and democracy have always argued that people are too selfish, frightened, and confused to bring these hopeful principles to life. The last several hundred years have been a test of the question, with mixed evidence -- good results from North America and the last 60 years of European history, disasters in Europe between 1914 and 1945, and Russia, alas, showing that no system, from monarchy to authoritarianism to democracy, is guaranteed to work. Globalization takes the same question to a new scale.

Do the biopolitical crises of Europe and Asia suggest that globalization makes the pessimists' argument? Is control over reproduction more freedom than we can handle, a kind of private selfishness that undermines politics and public institutions? Maybe. The answer will depend mostly on the intelligence and boldness of the political response. A pure laissez-faire approach to biopolitical problems might well mean a broken Europe, an inflamed Asia, and a failed globalization. On the other hand, a takeover of reproductive choices by the state might mean an even worse outcome, a return to the disastrous eugenic policies of twentieth-century totalitarianism. However, a political response that enhanced rather than cut back the personal freedom that drives the new biopolitics would make globalization fairer and more humane than it is now. And innovative financial arrangements could link the biopolitical fates of regions in a new model of an international and intergenerational bargain that would pave the way toward a governable globalization for mutual benefit.

The Biopolitical Atlas

Three biopolitical regions are emerging in the twenty-first century. First is an axis of inequality, including India, China, Taiwan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and parts of nearby East and Central Asia, which now have approximately 105 men per 100 women, with ratios among younger cohorts running as high as 118:100. Second is an axis of decline, sweeping in almost all of Europe along with Japan and South Korea, where fertility rates -- the average number of children born to an adult woman -- are well below the replacement rate of 2.1 required for a stable population. In a third group of countries, fertility presently hangs around the replacement rate: the United States, major Latin American countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, and even giant Indonesia are all somewhere in this band.

The Missing Women and Surplus Men

What do people in modernizing cultures do when they take reproduction out of the realm of luck and nature and put it under self-conscious control? In much of Asia, the answer has turned out to be that they have sons. For those conditioned by U.S. abortion politics to think of reproductive choice as always and entirely pro-woman, this is a disconcerting irony. Even more troubling is that millions of individual reproductive choices produce a massive demographic distortion -- scores of millions of men with no one to court, love, or marry.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen first drew attention to what he called "missing women" in 1990. Sen estimated a worldwide deficit of 100 million women relative to the natural distribution of sexes at birth. Although later research has adjusted his estimates modestly downward, the phenomenon has only accelerated. Official Chinese statistics now put the ratio of boys to girls under age six at 119:100. In India, the sex ratio at birth now approaches 114:100.

Observers have offered a number of competing explanations for Asia's sex ratios, including poor official record-keeping (suggesting the numbers may be a mirage) and the biological tendency of both improved maternal nutrition and hepatitis B infection to increase the share of male fetuses surviving to term. None is nearly adequate to explain Asia's dramatic numbers, however (in particular, the reported share of males has increased even as public statistics have improved and hepatitis B prevalence has fallen). And, in any case, although reliable figures are hard to come by, no one seriously disputes that sex-selective abortion and a bias toward sons in feeding and medical care contribute a great deal to Asia's sex ratios. Increases in the share of young men in the population have come with diffusion of inexpensive techniques for prenatal sex-identification. While aborting fetuses based on sex has been illegal in India since 1994, enforcement relies mainly on voluntary reporting by prenatal clinics and is all but meaningless. The first criminal sentence handed out under the act was in March 2006, and there are presently 37 criminal actions in process in a country of more than one billion people. Indian ads for prenatal sex-determination (which are technically illegal under the same law) trumpet how much less the procedure costs than a daughter's dowry -- a clear reference to the motive of ensuring that a family has sons. A study in one hospital in India's Punjab state found in the 1980s and 1990s that almost 14 percent of mothers of sons admitted having sexed their fetuses -- with reticence that may suggest underreporting. The comparable figure for mothers of girls was 2 percent. Presumably, the rest of the female fetuses were aborted.

The preference for sons in Asia has several interwoven sources. One is the cultural esteem given boys, men, and the parents of boys in societies where women's positions remain pervasively inferior. Another is economic: parents rely heavily on their children for retirement, and men's lifetime earnings remain much higher than those of women. China's one-child policy, which is strictly enforced in cities and often caps rural families at two children, intensifies both motives by raising the stakes of each birth. A daughter under those circumstances is not merely the first child, but the child.

Besides overwhelming sexual inequality, there is another problem with missing women: surplus men. For every absent 10 million women, there are 10 million men who will never marry and consequently will miss the main pathway to adult social integration. Unmarried men tend to unemployment, violent crime, and drug and alcohol abuse, and toward subcultures built around these. If they avoid these problems, they often swell the ranks of the army -- a potential source of instability in politically volatile societies. Most significantly, single young men are the prime recruitment targets of extremist political movements, from Hindu nationalists to Islamist cells. Those movements give the shiftless something to do and, often, material support to do it. They give displaced and disrespected men recognition and status. Their ideologies, built around clashes of good and evil with their own cadres in the vanguard, insert an element of heroism into disappointing lives. Marches, riots, and even terrorism offer violent adventure to restless spirits. When a general in the military of the Palestinian Authority sketched the social profile of a suicide bomber for terrorism expert Jessica Stern, he described a surplus man: "He can't find a job. He has no options and there is no social safety net to help him. ... He has no girlfriend or fiancee ... he has no money to go to the disco and pick up girls (even if that were acceptable). ... Marriage is not an option -- it's expensive and he can't even take care of his own family."

The next few decades look to be particularly sensitive ones for the politics of the countries with the largest numbers of surplus men. Pakistan's fragile authoritarian regime may or may not keep at bay Islamist forces that can expect to find their hardest men among the surplus males. While India's nationalists have a mainstream face that substantially kept control during the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s recent time in power, they also encompass large paramilitaries and thug bands that have led genocidal riots against Muslims. Even in government, the BJP has sometimes pressed an illiberal and aggressive form of nationalism, hostile to Muslims at home and obsessed with standing up to Muslim Pakistan. Fast-growing and restive China is a political black box at present. No outside observer knows how the country's political establishment will fare with its ideological cocktail of nationalism, residual socialist rhetoric -- and that essential fortification, economic growth. An economic crash, an open clash among a political elite that has been remarkable for its unified public face, or a confrontation with Taiwan could inspire political appeal to popular nationalist sentiment: then the "bare branches," as China calls its surplus males, could become a critical constituency.

Falling Fertility in the North

What do people in developed countries do when they take conscious control of reproduction? In Europe and much of North Asia, they stop reproducing. Or, more exactly, they have so few children that the population, after centuries of fairly rapid expansion, stabilizes and begins to shrink. Italy's fertility rate now stands at 1.28 children per woman, Germany's at 1.32, and Japan's at 1.33. Italy is typical of the Mediterranean countries -- Spain comes in a bit lower at 1.27 -- while Germany's neighbor Poland manages only 1.26. France and the Nordic countries are much more fertile, but still range between 1.64 (Sweden) and 1.87 (France).

Welfare states that depend on growing, or at least constant, populations are suddenly in serious jeopardy as relatively small numbers of current workers struggle to support their parents' larger (and now longer-living) cohort in its retirement. This, too, is unsettling to people who learned to think about reproductive politics in the United States, where we tend to regard childbearing decisions as a matter of personal morality. When millions of individual choices produce demographic shifts with major consequences for public institutions, the personal becomes political in a way that the feminists who coined that slogan would hardly have imagined.

And this political crisis does begin with the personal. Europe's declining fertility rates express changing priorities and ideas about the good life. Fertility has fallen as Europeans have put more emphasis on personal growth, the exploration of identity deep into adulthood, and nontraditional intimate relationships; fewer have chosen the traditional course of early marriage followed by childbearing. The wave of falling fertility has moved south in the last five decades, accompanying growing adherence to the "post-traditional" values that emphasize rich personal experience over customary roles and responsibilities. Even within countries, fertility is higher among traditionalists, lower among post-traditionalists. Reports from Japan suggest that an intense consumer culture and a cult of childhood have played a similar role there.

The difficulty for Europeans is a blown-up version of the familiar "baby bust" that promises to intensify the Social Security crunch in the United States. Falling fertility rates will not soon mean an absolute decline in population, although demographers predict that the populations of Italy, Germany, Japan, and Korea will slip by 2050. They do, however, mean relatively large cohorts of retirees will share those countries with relatively small populations of employed adults. That translates into a high "dependency ratio," the share of the population that does not work but depends on the productivity of others for its income. The share of Europeans eligible for pensions is expected to rise from 35 per 100 working-age adults today to 75 per 100 workers in 2050, with one-to-one ratios in Italy and Spain. Those figures represent a cruel drag on a productive economy. The European Commission estimates that pension and health care payments to retirees may drive up public spending by five to eight percentage points of GDP by 2040, crowding out productive investments.

If this were merely a technical problem, it would already be a technocrat's nightmare. Unhappily, rising dependency ratios threaten political consequences that go far beyond managing deficits, into the shadow regions of European nationalism and xenophobia. The post -- World War II social democratic order in Europe rests on strong social guarantees: employment protection, health care, and pensions. It is now clear that these guarantees were haunted all along by problems of efficiency and budget constraints -- although those might be surmountable on their own terms. The subtler taint on the European social order was its implicit reliance on ethnic sameness, the premise that the benefits one paid for in taxes would go to people like oneself. This interlacing of ethnic solidarity with public spending reached its apogee in West Germany's nearly crippling decision to absorb the former East Germany, extending one of the world's strongest economies and most generous welfare states to a dysfunctional authoritarian society. The European problem with immigration is not only racism or incompetence at managing assimilation, but also the fact that joining a European polity brings a hefty batch of entitlements, which Europeans balk at extending to new arrivals.

Paradoxically and perhaps tragically, the only straightforward way to ease the shock to Europe's social spending is a massive increase in immigration, importing working-age taxpayers to reduce the dependency ratio and support retired Germans and Italians. Yet Europe seems less able to handle immigration sanely than to take on just about any other problem: the riots that locked down French cities and spread to other parts of the continent last fall were only the visible edge of a continent-wide discomfort that led the Rand Corporation's European division to conclude that "the sheer numbers of immigrants that are needed to prevent population aging in the EU and its member states are not acceptable in the current socio-political climate." Even if Europeans managed to press past their ethnocentric politics, it is not clear that new citizens would vote to keep supporting aged Europeans to whom they felt limited allegiance -- or that native-born Europeans, retired or otherwise, would endorse anything like the current level of social guarantees for the increasingly diverse working population as it aged.

The American Oddity

The remarkable thing about the United States, in the midst of the world's biopolitical crises, is how well our lack of a population policy works. Although politically embattled, abortion is widely available, along with a sophisticated array of birth-control techniques and technologies for all manner of prenatal screening. We enjoy as much power as Europeans to enforce our preferences for long childhoods, longer adolescences, and freedom to explore our own personalities and intimate relationships rather than change diapers and break up toddler fights. Yet the fertility rate of native-born Americans is just slightly below the replacement rate, and higher rates among immigrants keep the country's overall fertility above replacement level. Although our Social Security system needs fixing, its demographic stresses are within reason: in 2050, demographers predict, the average American will be 36, compared with the average European, who will be 52. Those are different universes for pension policy.

We also have far more power than most Indians or Chinese to select among embryos to avoid disfavored traits and try to give an advantage to the children we bring to term, much to the alarm of conservative social critics who have predicted that a laissez-faire eugenics will result. But there is no evidence yet of any systemic distortions in the children Americans choose to bear: by and large we -- like the Europeans -- love, or at least live with, the children we have, and we do not try to ensure in the womb that we get children we will love.

What works for us highlights basic differences between the United States and Europe. If the United States were less immigrant-friendly, our native-only demographics would resemble those of France -- although our birthrate would still be higher than the French rate and much higher than those of Germany, Italy, and other low-fertility societies. On the one hand, the demographic advantage of immigration rewards an American virtue that many commentators pointed out after last year's French riots: a flexible and inclusive idea of national identity that makes room for just about anyone who is willing to "act American," which means holding a job, raising a family, participating in consumer culture, speaking English, and expressing patriotism. That is a much looser standard than the language-and-culture essentialism that has replaced blood and soil in European national identity. On the other hand, the contrast with Europe is a reminder that American membership guarantees very little: limited health care, expensive higher education, no permanent support for poor families or the unemployed. As a matter of fiscal accounting, the American friendliness to immigrants comes cheap, welcoming low-wage and usually eager workers with strictly limited rights to social support. An immigrant may take your job, which is the crux of resentment in the rural and working-class populations that are least welcoming to immigrants, but there is not much more he can take from you.

Dysfunctional Globalization -- and a Solution

Taken as a whole, global demographic trends portend a dysfunctional world order. The threats to U.S. interests are at least two. The first is a weak and politically fractious Europe, its attention focused inward on fiscal crises and immigration conflicts, its resources drained by pension and health care payments, its population old and tired. If this were 1900, with Europe the world's main source of instability and imperial adventure and the leading competitor to U.S. power, that might be a cause for relief. In this century, though, despite recent (and narcissistic) attention to trans-Atlantic differences, the United States and Europe are allies almost perforce: Europe is the one other region of the world stably committed to liberal democracy, human rights, and some version of lawful international order. It is also massively weakened in international affairs, relative to its population and wealth, by its relentless attention to internal and neighborhood problems attendant on the ambitious project of uniting the continent.

A Europe that could put its own house more or less in order would be a major force for orderly international relations as it and the United States enter an inevitable decline relative to newly rich and powerful countries elsewhere. A Europe too distracted by its own failures to act effectively abroad would leave the United States alone to try to manage the transition to a multipolar world -- a task we have so far engaged in fecklessly and with some disastrous results, such as the Iraq war, which a stronger European partner might save us from repeating.

The other threat is more dramatic. India is now a relatively liberal and stable nuclear power, however unsettling the nationalist undercurrents of its politics. China is a more or less reliable rational actor in international affairs, however shaky its internal ideological consensus. Imagine an India that more closely resembled Pakistan: a country with an illiberal and undemocratic government hemmed in by extremists who, if they came to power, would take its politics in a scarier direction still. India approached that level of domestic repression and international paranoia when Indira Gandhi assumed emergency powers in the 1970s, a time when nationalist forces were much less politically developed than today. If that scenario still seems a stretch, then instead imagine either India or China in the grip of nationalist fervor strong enough to produce disruptive foreign adventures. Those scenarios do not require much imagination: a Chinese government willing to satisfy widespread popular sentiment by invading Taiwan, or an India determined to deal once and for all with Pakistan, is hardly more fantastic than, say, a U.S. government willing to settle old scores and indulge ideological visions by launching a unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq. While the United States undertook its disastrous adventure only when the politics of September 11 and the Bush Administration's fixation on Iraq combined to overcome popular skepticism about war abroad, China and India may be carried forward on waves of popular sentiment.

Laissez-Faire and the Bargain Model

One element of globalization is the worldwide spread of modernity -- mobility, individual choice, uncertainty about what kind of life to lead, and technology that gives new power to human desires. The demographic gap between men and women in Asia arises from the technology of modernity operating in the absence of the cultural values that modernity has brought in the North Atlantic: above all, egalitarian individualism, in which men and women share in reproductive decisions and, much of the time, women make the final choice. Instead, the power to control reproduction now operates in settings where women are devalued and profoundly disadvantaged. How people use the technology reflects these inequalities. The problem of missing women and surplus men comes from an uneven spread of freedom, in which women exercise new choice in hierarchical and oppressive situations -- choices made in corners, you might say. The more real control women exercise over all dimensions of their lives, the more likely it is that they will raise daughters in place of sons, pushing the demographic balance back into place. There is even evidence that the more power women have, the less likely a society is to tilt toward authoritarianism. In this respect, if there is a paradox in modern freedom, the answer is to become even freer.

But how do we get from here to there? The problem is familiar: globalization increases overall wealth and overall choice, but often in ways that produce social and economic disruption, political conflict, and terrible paradoxes like the missing women. Some of this is inevitable in an imperfect world; but part of the reason we have politics, rather than only markets, is to try to manage the gains, harms, and dangers of sweeping change. Is there a way to balance the effects of globalization without curtailing its benefits? And does biopolitics suggest part of an answer?

Take Europe's demographic, fiscal, and immigration crises as a starting point. Two major features of globalization, capital movement and labor migration, are partly responses to differences in wage rates across nations. Those rates reflect, among other things, the ratio of capital to labor in each economy, with employers in high-capital countries paying more for relatively scarce labor and plentiful labor taking low wages in low-capital countries. In a borderless world where the cost of migration were zero, workforces would rearrange themselves -- as capital has begun to do -- until a single, global wage prevailed in each industry. If Europe did liberalize immigration, that move would enable workers in low-wage countries to take advantage of high European wages. Immigrant workers would drag European wages down somewhat, but with the offsetting benefit of increasing the working population paying into pension systems.

But Europe is not likely to liberalize immigration radically, and if it did, the political results might be ugly. Is there is a way to get some of the same benefits without moving people across borders? The best chance of doing so would be an example of what, drawing on proposals developed by Yale economist Robert Shiller, I call the bargain model of globalization: the use of international, market-based arrangements to manage the costs and benefits of economic integration.

Imagine a contract in which the governments of Germany, Japan, and Italy agreed to subsidize investments in education, public health, and infrastructure in India and China. In return, the Indian and Chinese governments would commit a share of future GDP to subsidize the public pension plans of the investor countries as their dependency ratios rise. The effect would be international and intergenerational burden-sharing that acknowledged and addressed what each region lacks. Today's rising generation in developing countries would get some of the public-investment benefits of living in a capital-rich society, by way of investments from such societies. Tomorrow's retirees would then harvest some of the benefits of living in a country with a large and dynamic working-age population, without actually living in such a country.

A bargain like this one would have some of the virtues of a market arrangement. No party would enter if it didn't expect to wind up better off as a result. The payments would reflect the best available judgments about the economic and demographic prospects of each country. There would be incentive for inclusion: a contract that included India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, and others would spread risk and increase the likelihood of an adequate payoff.

This bargain could also fit into a strategy for women's empowerment: properly targeted, the public investments in the first stage could do a lot for women's literacy, access to family planning, job training, and other aspects of sexually egalitarian development. Such investments would help women in developing countries push back against their increasingly male-dominated societies: skills and employment give women control of resources and an exit option from the family. Literacy also brings women into contact with a broad world of aspirations and ideas about what they might do and who they might be. Globalization that equalizes power in economic, social, and intimate life is less likely to produce perverse results like the problem of missing women. There is also some evidence -- far from conclusive, but still provocative -- that women's empowerment is good for democracy. Political scientist M. Steven Fish has found that indicators of women's status, particularly literacy and employment, correspond to democratic political culture as measured by the research organization Freedom House, even adjusting for the well-recognized correlation between democracy and social and economic development. Another political scientist, Karen Stenner, reports that susceptibility to authoritarian political appeals is highest worldwide among people with a hierarchical view of family structure, suggesting a link between the way intimate decisions are made and the way political culture develops.

Can It Work?

There is nothing novel in a bargain model of globalization except the size of the bargains. From health insurance to mutual funds, modern social life rests on complex markets in risk that distribute the impact of costs and benefits that we cannot individually control. These are among the most humane features of market life: voluntary, mutually advantageous devices to check some of the arbitrariness of luck. A bargain model of globalization would extend the logic of voluntarily sharing costs and benefits to countries undergoing one of the most disruptive transformations in world history.

Other trial runs for a bargain model might include a similar arrangement between the United States and India. Imagine if the money sunk into the Iraq adventure had gone instead to the front end of a bargain that purchased medium-term payments into Social Security, beginning 25 years out, taken from India's current 7 percent annual growth. Another frontier for a b

Is the Common Good, Good?

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 19:20:00 -0400

One of my favorite pieces from the Onion, the satirical newspaper, appeared just after September 11, 2001. It opened, "Feeling helpless in the wake of the horrible September 11 terrorist attacks that killed thousands, Christine Pearson baked a cake and decorated it like an American flag Monday." True to form, the article is lightly ironic as it traces the fictional Topeka legal secretary's rummage through her kitchen cabinets in a frenzy of distress and media exhaustion. It ends, though, with a middle-American version of the "Yes" at the end of Ulysses as Pearson presents the confection to her neighbors:

"I baked a cake," said Pearson, shrugging her shoulders and forcing a smile as she unveiled the dessert in the Overstreet household later that evening. "I made it into a flag."
Pearson and the Overstreets stared at the cake in silence for nearly a minute, until Cassie hugged Pearson.
"It's beautiful," Cassie said. "The cake is beautiful."

I've been thinking about Michael Tomasky's essay since I first read it two months ago. I think it's insightful and important. And every time I think of it, my mind runs to the Onion piece, which felt emotionally truer to me in those weeks than all the soaring and (justifiably) belligerent responses of politicians.

When Tomasky writes about the common good, he means an idea about America that people identify with, that they feel is part of who they are. Tomasky isn't interested in just any community -- the Catholic Church, black people, northern Californians -- but in an idea of the national community. He wants that idea of America to have the power to make demands on us: to reveal duties and make us proud of fulfilling them or ashamed of failing them. And he wants Democratic politicians to call this idea of the common good into being.

He points to the mid-1960s as the last time politicians -- Democrats, anyway -- talked convincingly about the common good, and points especially to President Johnson. LBJ is a good choice: less obvious than the Kennedys, and arrestingly eloquent in his best speeches.

Two strands of common-good language were strong in American politics in this period. One, which LBJ shared with the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr., is the one Tomasky wants the Democrats to re-take. It invited Americans to identify with the country as an unfinished project, full of promise but also burdened by moral failures and in danger of never becoming the nation it ought to be. This language was full of intense images of brotherhood, insisting, in the phrase now relegated to lefty bumper stickers, that no one was free while others were oppressed. King in his "I have a dream" speech praised whites who "have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom." Johnson, in the same civil-rights address that Tomasky aptly quotes, asked "How many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we wasted energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror?" The impulse in this language was moral connection to the national community: if America is unjust, every American is diminished. If America rights itself, every American is greater for that.

This strand also called on government to help make life richer and more meaningful. With the pen of speechwriter Robert Goodwin, the rough Texan LBJ spun images that far outdid poor Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning." Defining the aims of "the Great Society," he spoke of the need to move past "soulless wealth" to "enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization." He defined the Great Society as a humanist paradise, "where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. ...where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community." He evoked a country without poverty or racial injustice, but also one "where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor."

The second strand found its voice in Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Even before the New Left and the national meltdown over Vietnam, leaders of the New Right were calling on citizens to identify with their version of national greatness. The difference was that they treated American greatness as something already achieved, threatened only by the self-doubt of wussy liberals. Goldwater announced confidently, "Now, we Americans understand freedom. We have earned it." For Reagan, the defect in American society was liberal reluctance to fight communism: "Should Christ have refused the cross?" he asked a national television audience in 1964, insisting that the country's freedom must be worth dying to defend. Both men invoked foreign peoples' struggle for freedom abroad, particularly in communist countries. But at home they found no room for what Johnson called, in praising the struggle for civil rights, "man's unending search for freedom." The language of Reagan and Goldwater offered national greatness as a source of personal dignity and a cause for self-sacrifice, just as King's and Johnson's did; but you can boil down its essence to Toby Keith's post-9/11 boast, "We'll stick a boot in your ass, it's the American way."

What's remarkable today is that both strands are more alive in the language of the Right than in progressive rhetoric. I doubt I need to persuade anyone that, even with his job-approval rating hovering in the batting-average range, George W. Bush does a better Toby Keith than anyone in the Democratic Party. But he also does a better LBJ than any Democrat but, maybe, Barack Obama in one of his now-and-again soaring moments. Accepting the Republican nomination in 2000, Bush sounded like LBJ tilting at "soulless wealth": "Prosperity can be a tool in our hands used to build and better our country, or it can be a drug in our system dulling our sense of urgency, of empathy, of duty." He accused the Clinton administration of squandering the wealth and peace of the 1990s, and used President Clinton himself as an emblem of a feckless culture: "Our current president embodied the potential of a generation -- so many talents, so much charm, such great skill. But in the end, to what end? So much promise to no great purpose."

Like LBJ and King, Bush is able to define national greatness in cultural, moral, and spiritual terms -- the terms in which so many people understand their own lives as either rich or poor. Unlike them, he gives this call to greatness an entirely apolitical turn. "We discovered," he declared in his 2000 acceptance speech, "that who we are is more than important than what we have. And we know we must renew our values to restore our country. This is the vision of America's founders. They never saw our nation's greatness in rising wealth or in advancing armies, but in small, unnumbered acts of caring and courage and self-denial." LBJ named the same goals, although he did not write government out of the story: the Great Society was to be a place "where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods." This is the everyday language of the good life. Our current president may be inarticulate when left to his own words, but he can deliver his speechwriters' renderings of that language with conviction and credibility. I am waiting for the progressive politician who can do the same, and tell the country what government has to do with the good life.

Let me give a few thoughts about why that is so hard to do, and what it might look like if it happened. First, appeals for progressive versions of economic fairness are harder to fit into the familiar story of American moral greatness than appeals for racial justice. There is a deep-seated and widespread belief that the American market economy is basically a natural and fair system, and that interference with it deserves suspicion. The famous statistic from the estate-tax debate, which almost 40 percent of Americans believe they are or soon will be among the wealthiest one percent of the country, is a testament not to bad actuarial skills but to the power of that belief: this economy will give me what I deserve. Princeton political scientist Jennifer Hochschild reports that more than 80 percent of the country agrees with the statement that people get their just desserts in American economic life. Hostility to taxes and open redistribution reflects a moral belief about what makes the country great, one that may fit awkwardly with Bush's language of compassion and opportunity, but which is openly hostile to a progressive picture of shared economic sacrifice.

Second, part of the reason progressive common-good language is so hard to find is that the last forty years of progress in diversity and personal autonomy didn't just distract progressives from solidarity: they eroded our ability to invoke it convincingly. The inconvenient fact is that Americans are more willing to spend money to support people they see as like themselves than to support strangers -- or worse. As Tomasky points out, the New Deal worked its wonders for a national community with white-supremacist struts. The part of the Great Society that we remember -- the War on Poverty -- had its genuine flaws, but it was broken in good part on racial resentment. Decades of real progress in tolerance and openness have made the country a much better one, but have also made us more nearly a country of strangers. I will take that combination in a heartbeat over a country of racial oppression, sexual inequality, and cultural conformity. But taking it means taking its costs. The equality of tolerance is not that far from indifference, and very far from the equality of opportunity that LBJ envisioned. Whether we can have both is, at the very best, an open question.

Third, the search for a richer life that LBJ identified with the Great Society is underway everywhere but in government: in yoga and Pilates studios, churches and living rooms, pharmaceutical labs and psychotherapy clinics, Rick Warren's church and the editorial offices of Saveur, and all sorts of consumer technology labs -- the hundreds of thousands of places where billions of dollars and hours go into the unending search for meaning and satisfaction. In the last decade, parts of my social, professional, and emotional life have been changed by yoga, my laptop, the iPod shuffle function, and the American discovery of good food, to name only the less personal instances. I'd imagine I'm typical of Prospect readers, and lots of other Americans, in this experience. (Except for listing yoga instead of church, I'm not even sure I've distinguished myself from suburban conservatives.) Around the middle of April, as usual, I recalled Oliver Wendell Holmes's remark that he liked paying taxes because it felt like purchasing civilization. This year, it summoned nothing warmer than bitter irony as I thought about Iraq, Halliburton, earmarking, and cuts in Medicaid and student loans.

These are some of the reasons that I like to think about Michael Tomasky's essay and the Onion's cake story at the same time. The Onion is written for people who sometimes feel the way I sometimes feel: cynical, a little too easily disappointed, attuned to the private satisfactions of self-cultivation, institutions and publications and neighborhoods that suit us, and, above all -- if sometimes a little warily -- friendship and love. The American Prospect also is written for people who sometimes feel the way I sometimes feel: partisan, hopeful, civic-minded, looking for a way to shape those feelings into commitments more definite than a "Kerry sucks less" sticker.

A progressive language of the common good will have to speak to people where they live. My guess is that will have less to do with historical wrong and destiny than LBJ and King's rhetoric, more to do with finding ways to make the workplace more compatible with family life, mobility more compatible with security, and the (literal, not figurative) places where we live more compatible with living well. My guess is that, like the Progressivism that helped shape the New Deal, it will involve not just rhetoric, but also appeals to institutional imagination and innovation, a search for new ways that education and public spending can make equality of opportunity a goal rather than a slogan. A Democratic party that did this would reclaim for politics some of what we now instinctively ascribe to technology and private institutions: not so much the power to ennoble as the knack of improving our lives. But if we created a government that turned improving people's lives back into a credible political aim, that would ennoble us enough.

And it would help if the language were funny -- funnier than this essay. Lincoln was funny. Reagan was funny, although with creepy flashes of sadism. Barack Obama seems to be funny. ("They say Democrats don't stand for anything. That's just not true. Democrats do stand for anything!") Wit doesn't muddy his gift for evoking the common good. I look forward to a progressive language that skewers right-wing pieties and lies with the withering, wry, plaintive exasperation of Jon Stewart, then gets down to explaining why we need a government that works if we're going to have the best lives we -- all of us -- can have. That will be a confection I can salute.

Democracy and Disaster

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

In a country as wealthy and technologically capable as the United States, there is no such thing as a simple natural disaster. Every disaster is also a social event, made up by human will and ingenuity--or neglect and indifference. Famines, famously, do not happen in democracies, because no matter how severe a drought or blight, only the voiceless and powerless are ever left to starve. Storms may sometimes wreck cities; but if they also claim thousands of lives, that is a not a natural disaster but a political wrong, and the judgment belongs on the city and the state that left their people there. What does the wreckage of New Orleans say about American democracy?

The pictures seem to confirm Europe's worst suspicions about the United States. In the desperation and vulnerability they portray, they are images of a failed state, of a Third World concealed just beneath American wealth, and of an armed and violent people primed for guerrilla warfare against their neighbors.

That terrible impression is not the most illuminating. The basic failure is in American political culture's tolerance of deep and crippling inequality. The more immediate failure is that the country is now governed by people who do not take seriously either the purposes or the tasks of government.

First let us be clear on where the apocalyptic interpretation is wrong. American civil society is not sick, broken, or made up entirely of homeowners with shotguns. People around the country are offering beds, classrooms, and jobs to refugees from New Orleans, doctors and other professionals are hurrying there as volunteers, and private donations are rising too fast for charities to manage them. Americans are good at charity and volunteerism--better than Europeans, statistics suggest. In crises like this one, despite the ways that race wounds and divides the country, charity is nearly color-blind. Racial bigotry no doubt inflected some reactions in ugly and shameful ways, but it does not account for the disastrous inadequacy of the overall response.

Inequality took the highest toll in New Orleans. Even though the African-American middle and professional classes have grown in recent decades, the wealth of black families in the United States remains on average only one-tenth that of whites. Families in poor, black neighborhoods like those of New Orleans often live on monthly checks, with few or no assets. The hurricane came at the end of the month, when cash was scarce or gone. Some 100,000 people in New Orleans had no car--a common situation for the poor in large cities. Public transport--mostly buses--is grossly inadequate in most of the United States, particularly in the South. The evacuation order came to people who often had literally no way to leave and who, had they found a way out, would have been stranded elsewhere with no money and nowhere to stay. (Not until the disaster was underway did Houston, Texas, a six-hour drive away, begin accepting refugees.) The handful of wealthy whites who remained in New Orleans appear to have been tourists who arrived by plane--who, like the local poor, had to depend on public transport and found they had no way to escape. As the law permits rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges of Paris, so also it ordered rich and poor alike to abandon New Orleans: but for many of the poor, the command came as a cruel--and deadly--practical joke. From health care to education to policing, American inequality constrains and distorts the lives of the poor; here it literally took them.

Why do Americans accept poverty that traps the poor in the path of an approaching disaster? Ironically, one reason is social optimism. Most Americans--about ninety percent, including most blacks--say they believe this is a just country, where the rules of social and economic life are fair and effort and opportunity are rewarded. (Little wonder, then, that twenty percent of Americans tell pollsters they believe themselves to be among the country's richest one percent, and another twenty percent say they expect to enter that charmed circle soon.) The flip side of this optimism is the suspicion that, if you end up poor or sick or alone, the fault must be in you, and the judgment belongs on you. It is the American habit to admire the rich and powerful and recoil from the weak and poor--even if the weak and poor include one's self. The result is a political culture where policies meant to aid the disadvantaged--such as welfare payments, universal health care, and racial preferences in hiring--are regarded as intrusions on the natural order. By contrast, Americans rallied in 2001 to repeal the federal tax on inheritance, enshrining the principle that what you earn you have the right not only to keep, but to pass on undiminished to your children and their children. The money lost to those tax cuts contributed to cuts in federal disaster preparation, and in other social programs. The kinds of policies that would have left the poor of New Orleans less trapped run counter to the American intuition that social life is already fair and favors the deserving.

The idea that poverty and wealth are natural also reflects a basic confusion about state and society. A major strain of American political culture has never admitted that the state has a part in ordering society. This strain is a type of romantic libertarianism: those who hold it believe that private relationships and private virtues--the family, the marketplace, and churches and voluntary associations--are not just important to society, but sufficient to maintain it. They regard the state as a source of intrusion and inefficiency at best, tyranny at worst.

Romantic libertarianism is a doctrine made for neglectful government. It is the doctrine of George W. Bush's Republican Party. The state exists in part to do what private citizens generally will not and cannot do: plan and execute collective action to avert faraway and uncertain disaster. The danger to New Orleans from a hurricane strike was long familiar. After an earthquake in California and a terrorist strike in New York, it was regarded as the leading threat to American lives. Yet after 2001, as tax cuts and the war in Iraq strained the federal budget, funding slipped for flood control and the maintenance of levees. President Bush put the federal agency that plans for and manages disasters in the hands of a political ally with no relevant competence. Preparation for disaster was conducted on gambler's principles--luck and, maybe, superstition--and not as if planning and public infrastructure mattered. Even as Katrina bore down on New Orleans, the government did little to enforce its "mandatory evacuation" order, or to gather and direct resources in anticipation of disaster. In a country where it is hard to throw a stone without hitting a power-boat or SUV, and where the civilian National Guard retains considerable resources at home even during its deployment to Iraq, people remained on rooftops, elevated highways, and levees for days, the victims of an apparent breakdown in the command and control of the rescue operation.

Some of the neglect was opportunistic, and ideology at best provided emotional comfort to the negligent. The Bush administration obsessively rewards its friends and punishes--or, if they are lucky, merely ignores--its enemies. New Orleans, which is poor, black, and Democratic, was never going to be high on this administration's list for infrastructure development or disaster-relief planning. But opportunism has its own philosophy: the supposition, sometimes inarticulate but often explicit, that because government is neither a necessity nor a high responsibility, the president and his allies can use its power and resources without principle. The limit condition of this attitude is the failure to provide order after Katrina struck. In this respect, New Orleans resembles Baghdad, another city where American failure to meet the basic responsibilities of governance created a moral disaster. American libertarians are always shocked and dismayed by spontaneous disorder, and take it as a judgment on the disorderly. It is partly that, of course, but first and foremost it is a judgment on those who duty was to keep order. Thus when President Bush declared of the tepid relief effort in New Orleans, "The results are not acceptable," the vacuity of his statement was stunning: "the results" were his responsibility, and the judgment he passed was either on himself or it was meaningless. In the event, it was meaningless.

The basis of this libertarian indifference is denial that in a complex society, private security and private virtue ultimately depend on the state's monopoly over violence. Private life, even at its most generous and imaginative and free, is conducted against the backdrop of state power: the power that enforces private contracts, distributes private property, and will jail or even kill the intruder who tries to force his way into a private home. Without that security, people become dangerous to one another--not because most people are predatory, but because some are, and in a world without law, paranoia and preemptive violence grow: man is not a wolf to man, but he can learn to be; the law and the state avert that lesson.

Such dangerous naivete also feeds on a kind of metaphysical optimism, a disbelief that anything good ever goes away or is destroyed. The religious belief in an afterlife may figure in here, but probably more important is the relative gentleness of American experience. Generations of Europeans in the last century grew up in cities and nations that war and totalitarianism had destroyed or made unrecognizable by the time they were adults. Nothing of that sort has happened here. September 11, 2001, which still looks likely to be an epoch-making event, destroyed a few blocks. The thought that an important American city is in some sense gone is staggering; it must have seemed a fantastical idea both to those charged with planning for it and to some in the city as the storm approached. Now we should know better; but, then, we should always have known better.

After the disaster of New Orleans--the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the social disaster of the failed response--there is no more room for the illusion that the virtues of charity and voluntarism are enough to keep people safe and well. This is to confuse their goodness with their effectiveness. They are virtues precisely because they express recognition that people are vulnerable and fragile, that we need one another to stay safe and alive. But the point of government is very different: it is to make people less acutely fragile, vulnerable in fewer ways. There is no risk--rather, no hope--that we can ever overcome our vulnerability; but the scenes from New Orleans are reminders of why reducing it has been the great purpose of modern government. They are also grim reminders of how imperfectly the world's richest and most powerful country has pursued that end.

Neoliberalism Comes to Domestic Policy

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Understandably, Europeans think of George W. Bush as a president focused on foreign policy. In the three years between al Qaeda's attacks on the United States and his re-election, Bush invaded two countries, reworked America's global alliances, and brought to crisis the traditional relationship across the North Atlantic. It is unlikely that he would have been re-elected without the air of perpetual crisis that his foreign policy brought to the recent presidential campaign.

In 2000, however, Bush was elected as a candidate of domestic policy. His major achievement in the year before September 11, 2001 was slashing tax rates for the richest Americans, especially the federal tax on inheritances, which is the United States' most important tax on wealth rather than income. In 2005, we can expect to see the second Bush administration pick up the domestic mission of its first year, changing the structure of American taxation and social insurance.

Does that mean Europeans can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to the long and crooked road of completing and expanding their union of nations? No, quite the opposite. The most obvious reason is that the Iraq adventure will continue, with all its implications for the politics of the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world -- which tend to pitch up on Europe's doorstep. The more basic reason, though, is that Bush's domestic policies will deepen the division between the European and American social models, putting the two continents on different paths for the coming decades.

The Bush agenda for the second term has two main aims. First, the administration wants to do away with Social Security, the national pension system that has been the keystone of the American welfare state since the 1930s. Bush urges replacing the program with private savings -- basically returning to the arrangements of the nineteenth century. At the moment, it is impossible to say whether the Bush strategy will succeed. With Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, Bush can get his way unless popular resistance makes the price too high for Republicans.

The American right has hated Social Security since it was enacted, regarding it as a little bit of Europhilic socialism that saps the free-enterprise spirit of the United States. For many decades, though, the program was unassailably popular: it guarantees some income and a modicum of dignity in old age. It has moved the elderly from a high rate of poverty to quite a low rate. In short, it has made American society more decent and individual lives less fearful. In the face of this support for the program, the Bush administration has launched a massive campaign to convince the public that Social Security is headed toward fiscal disaster for demographic reasons. In fact, actuarial estimates suggest Social Security is probably in pretty good shape, and much better off than Europe's more generous pension systems. The administration, though, demonstrated before the Iraq War that it will lie and spread fear to get its way.

Bush's second aim is to deepen his tax cuts for the wealthy, and make permanent some cuts that he advertised as temporary when they were first passed. If he succeeds in both aims, American society will become much more unequal and individual lives more uncertain. Inherited wealth and income from assets will be essentially untaxed, wages and consumption will be taxed relatively heavily, and there will be no guarantee of a minimum income in retirement. At present, the United States bears a recognizable resemblance to Europe, although with more free-market features. If Bush's domestic agenda prevails, the two will become different kinds of societies, with differences akin to those between, say, Germany and Brazil. That would be a harder, sadder world.

Where Progressives Go Now

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Progressives have to make sense of confronting a radical opponent, because the American Right is now radical, and the president is their standard-bearer. How else to describe an administration committed to changing taxation and social insurance root and branch, revising the basic rules of international order, and remaking faraway societies by force? And, not to forget, an administration willing -- indeed, seemingly delighted -- to bankrupt the country and jeopardize our authority in global currency markets in pursuit of these visionary schemes.

In the face of an extremist program, the first response of the decent and sensible is to fall into a small-c conservative posture, raising doubts that used to belong to the skeptical, anti-utopian right, the students of Michael Oakeshott and heirs of Edmund Burke. Is it wise, or even acceptable, to shatter policies that make people's lives more decent and tolerable? Is it not reckless to take control of other people's governments and presume to set them on the road to reason and freedom? Don't we have to put -- and keep -- our house in order before we do anything else? Is any policy more irresponsible than eating our fiscal seed corn? And, for God's sake, can our leaders not tell the truth? John Kerry's campaign was in many ways a vehicle of just this sort of protest.

Right on, as far as it goes. This is, as prudent conservatives might say, entirely right and proper. Preserving what's good -- and sometimes what's merely tolerable -- against what promises to be worse is a major part of the work of politics. So is guarding against the perennial mistakes of arrogance, especially the arrogance of power. To this point, we should be upset not because we are on the prudent defensive, but because we might lose.

This leads to what I guess is the purpose of the Principles Project: recognizing that we're at risk of losing partly because we have trouble saying what we're for, rather than what we're against. I begin with more-than-faint praise of the prudent, preservationist strand of today's progressive politics because I think it doesn't deserve to become a whipping boy for anyone who would prefer a more robust program, and I fear it might. To state the ought-to-be obvious, what we want to preserve, and what we need to resist, should be consequences of what we want to bring about, and (to some extent) vice-versa. (I think, by the way, that this also means John Kerry doesn't deserve to be our whipping boy. I say this having shouted "He's going to lose" upon hearing various statements in the campaign, and -- more saliently -- having admired Andrei Cherny's diagnosis of the campaign's troubles in the NYT op-ed page. That said, the candidate's weaknesses were also the party's, and blaming the candidate the primary voters picked would be too convenient and unhelpful.)

There came a moment in the debates of both the 2000 and the 2004 presidential campaigns when the Democratic candidate suddenly looked like a white-collar guy in a blue-collar bar, caught with his eyes in the wrong place, trying to explain why he shouldn't get whipped. For Al Gore, it was on a question about gun control. For Kerry, it was abortion. On substance, Kerry did better with a hard issue. Kerry was probably closer to speaking his mind, with his careful account of how he doesn't like abortion, but opposes outlawing it. The trouble is, on these heartland issues, with their roots in the moral attitudes and cultural identities of a big swath of voters, the Democrats are in a bind, and they know it. They look scared, they backpedal like crabs fleeing to the sea, and they give the impression that they must be hiding something.

"The impression that they must be hiding something"? Yes. To overstate the case a little, people don't understand policy or know much about the platforms of the parties. In other words, most people don't understand "politics" in the way students and practitioners of politics do. Instead, they make their judgments using the same shorthand judgments that most of us are more or less expert at using in other areas of life: judging whether people seem comfortable, whether they appear to be telling the truth, whether they seem trustworthy. Issues like gun control are also, to some extent, shorthand signals. Like the way a colleague dresses or the car a neighbor drives, they answer the question, "Is this someone like me," or, more important and more salient, "Is this someone who is likely to respect me?" All the talk of which candidate voters would like to share a beer with goes to these shorthand signals. The signals, in turn, mainly carry messages on two themes: trustworthiness, and respect or disrespect for people like the voter. (There is, by the way, no overestimating the importance of respect, even a symbolic, gestural sort that doesn't cash out at all in policies. Bush understands this, and expresses it in symbolic ways that his father and John Kerry -- in one of those many similarities to Bush I that gave the last campaign its eerily Oedipal quality -- completely miss.)

Let me come clean: I hate this stuff. This way of talking about politics drains it of everything distinctly political, and makes it just another room in the mansion of marketing, entertainment, and social life. Trouble is, it seems to be accurate. Hate it or not, I'm sure I'll say it again. But it's not the only way: there are other kinds of political shorthand that are in fact political. They are signals people learn by belonging to social groups with specifically political purposes, like certain evangelical churches, and labor unions. The churches teach their members to line up politicians along a few bellwether issues, particularly abortion and prayer. The unions teach -- increasingly, taught -- their members to vote pocketbook issues that made economic class salient in American politics, even if most people didn't call it class.

If all this is more or less right, then there are two (stylized) ways for progressive candidates to get across to voters. One is what Andrei recommended in his excellent NYT piece: let them see who you are, and make it good. The other is to build movement organizations, like unions, in which people teach each other a political shorthand that stands in for progressive commitments. Ideally, the second leads -- as churches and unions sometimes do -- to deeper engagement with and understanding of the issues. In the mercenary-minded medium term, though, it also leads to victory.

I suppose that anyone who is involved in this project has certain goals in common: greater equality of opportunity, safety nets (such as universal access to health care) that would make economic sorting less merciless, and the preservation of civil and personal liberties. Past that consensus, I'd imagine that some run more in the egalitarian-libertarian direction, with a strong emphasis on personal freedoms such as abortion rights and a willingness to tolerate inequality (above the level of actual deprivation, anyway) while others as long as it arises from fair opportunity. Others, I'd imagine, take what a friend of mine self-mockingly calls a paleo-liberal line, committed to the welfare state, hostile to inequality, and with a premium on solidarity. (I have enough feeling for both that my sorting is a matter of mood and the weather, and comes up mostly when I imagine, for instance, whether I would trade Roe v. Wade for universal health care.)

If that's more or less right, then I'd think part of our aim would be to think about how to make some concatenation of these commitments more politically effective on one of the two templates I sketched earlier: candidate communication or movement building. Of course, the division is artificial as a matter of strategy. George W. Bush couldn't have won without (among other things, including the war in Iraq) both a communication style that convinces many people he's a straight-up guy and a movement of voters behind him. Moreover, the two reinforce each other in a more substantial way than just adding up to the sum of their parts: I'd imagine Bush is more confident speaking the language of evangelical morality because he knows that audience is out there, understanding and applauding him. By contrast, if you speak the language of social solidarity and egalitarianism on a national platform, it must be easy to feel like a voice in the wilderness. (Actually, this has been my experience writing on these themes in a personal voice.)

What are our prospects for a movement? We had a campaign movement for about a year, but it was basically an anti-Bush movement, which by the happenstance of the primaries morphed into a pro-Kerry movement. If it had legs, it would right now be turning into pro-Social Security movement. To tell the truth, I am close enough to it (if there is a single "it" to approach) to know whether this is true; but I have not yet had the impression it is.

If I were to sketch a movement trajectory over the next ten years, in an ideal world it would include the following: (1) a mass mobilization to save Social Security from privatization, funded by the Democrats, the AARP, and the same people who paid for the election drive, which would perforce involve meaningful education about the purposes of the program, the value of sharing risk, the power of basic forms of social solidarity, and the like; (2) a joint campaign by the major unions to organize Wal-Mart, that mother of all anti-worker employers, which would assert the relevance of organized labor and throw down the gauntlet before the old new economy of low wages and no benefits (transiently eclipsed by the new new economy of Silicon Valley wealth); (3) on the strength of these, renewed pressure for universal health care and repeal of the Bush tax cuts; and (4) partly as a result of the rest, an increase in civic self-confidence that would enable people to say, in response to the campaigns of fear and disinformation that are this administration's specialty, essentially what Howard Dean said in his primary campaign: "You haven't made the case to me, and I don't owe you anything until you do." That's how citizens should address elected leaders. Without a movement, though, it seems a majority of us won't.

What about the candidate part of the story? As I said, I think movements help candidates in all sorts of non-obvious ways, as well the obvious ones. Just let me echo about five million other progressives and say, Bring us someone who can do every night for a year what Barack Obama did in his keynote address to the DNC. That was a reminder that "revival" is a word with meaning: he reminded us what we believed, and why, and he made it fresh and immediate. Wesley Clark had some of those moments in the campaign, when he was at the top of his game, laying out the importance of progressive taxation with the authority of a man who has made money, saved lives, and ordered assaults. Needless to say, John Edwards did it sometimes, too, particularly mostly when he gave That Speech. Bush has shown that if you know your core beliefs and don't feel the need to run away from them -- or appear to feel that need -- people don't need to agree with you about everything. Give me a liberal candidate who knows his core beliefs and can explain them, and I'll put him up against Bush III and go door-to-door for him (or her) as well.

None of this has touched much on foreign policy or national security, where progressives badly need to find a voice that has so far evaded them, something that outdoes the Bush program in both its pragmatic and its visionary dimensions. In brief, I think progressive aims would include these: (1) To understand that terrorism and Islamic extremism, although indeed alarming and dangerous, cannot be allowed to structure our foreign policy to the exclusion of everything else; (2) to shift attention to engagement with India and China, where in two decades perhaps three billion people will live in polities that, at this point, could be either fascist-nationalist or semi-liberal and semi-democratic: these are pivot points for the next century of world history in a way that Islamic extremism almost certainly will not be unless by shifting the rudder of American policy; (3) to promote liberal and democratic standards for both domestic government and international relations, toward weaving a web of institutions and norms that will channel Chinese and Indian power -- quite the opposite of the space for untrammeled superpower self-assertion that we have been clearing recently, and will leave open for our successor; (4) to direct massive resources to women's education and empowerment, in the recognition that nothing drives a country's liberal trajectory further or faster; (5) to contain the ex-Soviet nuclear arsenal and move against the channels of nuclear proliferation; and (6) naturally, to lay the groundwork for international cooperation around global warming, the preservation of fisheries, and other transnational environmental threats.

The political difficulty is that none of these is exactly "war," and once war has been declared it is hard to trump politically, particularly in foreign affairs. Odds are it would take a candidate with moral and, quite possibly, martial authority to press the country in these directions while we are still entangled in the Bush adventures and the language of perpetual wartime -- the candidate some of us hoped Wesley Clark would turn out to be. These, too, though, can also be movement issues, particularly environmental protection and women's empowerment -- and the second redounds to all issues, inasmuch as it is the catalyst for liberalization generally.

I have been writing quickly for a couple of hours and, feeling I've gotten my points across, won't reach for a peroration. I think this is an important project, and I'm glad to have been invited to participate. I look forward to seeing other people's thoughts, and devoutly hope we make some contribution to the action that has hardly ever been more necessary than now.

A Way in the World

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

How should we use the world's only superpower? Two huge tasks for foreign policy are identifying the threats the country faces and choosing a strategy to address them. I am afraid we may be off track on both.

It is easy these days to say that terrorism, or Islamic extremism, presents the main threat to the United States. This seems obvious only if we rank threats by the chance that they will kill a large number of Americans tomorrow. Islamic terrorism probably counts first by that grim metric. But try a more complicated measure. Which threats (1) have the greatest chance of disrupting world order over the next twenty-five years and (2) present the biggest spread of good and bad outcomes? By asking this question, we get a clearer sense of where it might be most important to try to nudge -- or seize -- the rudder of history.

By the second measure, the answer is a lot less clear. Islamic terrorists are gangs, not governments. There's a limit to the resources they can throw at us, even if the weapons they might get their hands on are very frightening. And while it's true that their ideology has a lot in common with fascism -- at least in being anachronistic, violent, and deeply illiberal -- they don't control governments that they can use to mobilize populations, which is what turns fascist ideas into fascist societies. We should do a huge amount to stop them from killing people, especially Americans; but should we let them structure our foreign policy?

For other candidates, try India and China. Together they have almost 2.5 billion people, plenty of nuclear weapons, restive populations, and potentially unstable political systems. If they keep growing economically, they will shift the center of economic power eastward, as China has already begun to do. Political and military power will follow.

These countries aren't "threats" in the sense that their leaders want to kill Americans. But the direction they take in the next decades will be pivots of world history. Power in India wavers between some very nasty Hindu nationalists, who are as much fascists as the Islamic extremists, and some rather feckless liberal democrats. Popular sentiment in many ways is up for grabs between them. China, too, is home to a fierce and often militaristic nationalism, which could seize the moment of a political or economic crisis. China will be at risk of both types of crisis for at least a decade. Both countries also present a huge upside: three billion people living peacefully and freely a few decades from now.

Strategy follows threat. During the Cold War, we competed with Soviet influence in Europe by promoting prosperity and democracy. The Marshall Plan is the most famous instance, but right up to the collapse of communism in Central Europe, we were on the side of democratic movements like Poland's Solidarity and dissidents like Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who later became the first president of democratic Czecheslovakia. We also built up international institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and predecessor to the World Trade Organization, to extend liberal, capitalist influence. These strategies contributed to the ideological defeat of communism and the rise of democracy as the world's only meaningful standard of political legitimacy. They also produced a more interdependent world, stitched together by economic relations that everyone is reluctant to shatter. Both these developments have, almost incidentally, helped to keep India democratic and bring China nearer accountable government and rule of law than it would otherwise be. If this were our focus, we'd press relentlessly on shaping the world into which these powers will mature, using our moment of unchallenged power to promote democratic, liberal, and orderly standards for both domestic governments and international relations.

I fear that the overwhelming emphasis on Islamic terror and extremism draws us in another direction, toward the kind of strategy that formed the underbelly of the Cold War: alliances of convenience with brutal dictators and rebel movements, knife-fighting realpolitik across the chessboard of the world's poorest regions. Maybe that is wrong, and the Iraq adventure will, after all its disasters, prove the springboard of Islamic democracy. Even in that best of all possible outcomes, however, a foreign policy founded on a war against terrorism distracts us from developments that are more likely to shape the future of freedom and well-being, at a time when we are uniquely -- and transiently -- positioned to influence them. We are spending lives and treasure at a fast clip, and we may be doing so unwisely.