‘What can we expect now? It seems clear that the urban-centric policies of the Obama administration have not changed Americans’ migration patterns. The weak recovery has slowed migration, but expensive, overregulated and dense metropolitan areas continue to lose population to lower-cost, less regulated and generally less dense regions. This may speed up as recent tax hikes squeeze the hard-pressed middle class and if, as appears likely, the social media bubble continues to deflate.’
Click through for a net migration chart for 2010-2011.
‘The potential targets of drone attacks have no intention of subjecting themselves to the authority of the United States, so the only option left is to pursue them in territories where the United States exerts no effective control. In these settings, the futility of trial forces the government to take the controversial military option.
In dealing with that calculus, the United States could take citizenship into account in making its decision. But which way should that cut? Does a citizen deserve extra rights against the government that he has betrayed? Or should he be subject to additional sanctions? There is no clear answer, which is why U.S. policy on drone use for targeted attacks will remain an open wound in the body politic. It is both frightening and necessary to have to place such extensive trust in our public officials. But, when it comes to matters of national security, there is no other choice.’
Drone strikes can be a form of militarism lite, I suspect. For this President, they can meet the political goal of targeting the enemy without troops on the ground as in Afpak and Yemen, thus achieving this aim in a more ‘quiet’ way, appealing to the base which is conveniently quiet as well.
More broadly, do you trust our elected officials and non-elected officials to have such powers?
Drones could eventually bring up civil liberties issues, because they are so inexpensive, reduce risk of harm for the user, and can be used effectively by all sorts of people here at home, from criminals to law enforcement. They can be used to control a lot of the public sphere with minimal effort and cost.
I recall briefly thinking of Glenn Greenwald as almost in the anarchic tradition, but when he’s not, that he leans more toward progressive and liberal ideals, so he likely has animus against the State having such power in the first place (civil libertarian…he sued the Obama administration on behalf of the ACLU) but also because of the liberal lean he may have animus against those who would define liberty further away from a more progressive/liberal point of view (blaming America first for not having the right ideals, perhaps somewhere between Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange who both flirt with anarchy as well).
A very good analysis of the current Hamas-IDF skirmish in Gaza, and where it fits into other trends in the Middle East, with an interesting, modest proposal at the end (you’ll have to click through):
‘Today, we have to reverse the arrows: The ups and downs of the Palestinian impasse, like whether it is kinetic or not at any given time, have become instrumental with regard to the far more consequential future of politics in Egypt. Egypt is now less reliably useful to the United States as a mediator in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, but it has become far more important to the United States because its uncertain future will ramify across the entire, now destabilized Arab world, and also impinge significantly on the role of Iran and Turkey amid the Arabs.’
‘Exit polls from the regional elections in Catalonia show that pro-independence parties are winning a huge majority: up to 95 of the 135 seats in the regional assembly, according to analysis from theFinancial Times. Worse, from Madrid’s point of view, the radical pro-independence forces are doing unexpectedly well.’
I sat in an Barcelona office for a few weeks with a woman hired to work in the law school to promote Catalonian identity. She was very old, and her job seemed to consist of sitting at her desk for a few hours each day, making sure students put fliers up, and occasionally answering the phone in a shrill voice.
This is a bit more serious, possibly as serious a thing to happen since Tejero walked out onto the lower Parliment house in 1981 and tried to stage a coup.
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Some more on Mead and his discussion of what he sees as four competing American schools of thought that work their way into our foreign policy:
‘The real feat achieved by Gropius and his cohorts was to have recognized and exposed the sociopolitical and moral power of architecture and design. They wanted to exert “effective influence” on “general conditions,” fashion a more just world and turn all of this into a “vital concern of the entire people.”‘
I’m always a little skeptical of such grand visions. Utopianism runs deep.
Here’s Robert Hughes saving some choice criticism for the Empire State Plaza in Albany and the centralization of power through architecture as he saw it (a rich mix of the corporate and the bureaucratic from 50’s and 60’s America):
‘It would be a mistake, however, to regard the developments in the Islamic world as a counter-globalization against the one originated in the West. Instead of rejecting globalization, the Islamic world is finding its own way of globalization.’
Demographically, there are more Muslims now than before. I still think it’s best to not allow the highest ideals guiding the U.S. economy, our foreign policy, and our domestic politics be the culturally relative approach, nor ‘the European way,’ which has invited Muslims in for employment reasons and left them in ghettoes, allowing the pot to simmer for a while.
There are many important differences between the U.S. and Europe, but this more liberal, post-Enlightenment secularist worldview is still a product of the West, has some public sentiment going for it here in the U.S., and has serious blind-spots. While another neo-con invasion Iraq isn’t necessarily our goal, and clearly has, and will likely have consequences, the United States has business interests, oil interests, strategic and security interests throughout the Middle East.
On a related note, here’s a further debate from Intelligence Squared with Ayan Hirsi Ali on one side, arguing that Islam is the problem (the same absolutism in Islam that will not tolerate questioning of its tenets, its many violent passages, and its unreformed worldview which has a prescription for pretty much all aspects of the culture and public square). A member of the opposing side suggests that Muslim alienation in British life, combined with a European influenced fascist inspired-Islamism is the problem, not Islam itself (yes, it’s colonialist Europe’s fault).
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Where are the people in Egypt, the plurality or majority of the population, with enough money, time, education and opportunity to support the institutions necessary to resist the actual political will of the large Islamist movement in the country? This was the same movement formerly repressed by the SCAF and the enormous, corrupt bureaucratic structure that wielded power partially with our aid. Where are the people who have enough political will and support who could also resist the more radical, transformative currents in the region?
Well, now the Islamists are in power, however democratically elected they are.
What’s reasonable to hope and which ideals will guide us going forward?
‘The Swedish experience does demonstrate that it’s possible for a welfare-state society to survive the waning of religion and the decline of traditional marriage without sacrificing middle class prosperity. But this success is founded on a level of cultural homogeneity and an inheritance of social capital that simply isn’t available in a polyglot republic-cum-empire like our own.’
Riffing on Douthat: If liberty means extending liberty, or aiming to extend liberty to ever more groups of people through State involvement and a more moral bureaucratic class redistributing resources through the most up to date thinking or the new economic models, then at what cost does this occur to the creation of wealth? Can you even compare Sweden and the U.S effectively? What hard evidence do we have that these policies will work? More deeply: Who is in charge and how do such people ‘know’ what is best for others?
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I remain skeptical of some work by Charles Murray, but he had some interesting ideas on Sweden fifteen years back. That model has not been as successful in assimilating immigrants and maintaining Swedish birth rates nor arguably economic dynamism, and there is a pendulum which can swing back darkly to the right, to nationalism, racial identity and the baggage of the past:
“In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their “child-friendly” policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers, and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. Those same countries are ones in which jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And they, with only a few exceptions, are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, least often seen as a vocation, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.”
As Murray suggests, the prevailing European secular habit of mind (which shuns overt religious faith) has also transposed a lot of Christian metaphysics (and a lot Marxist materialist/socialist/social democrat/communist thought) into the modern European state. Many religious values continue of course, but are also, in part, maintained by that state. That state, in turn, can limit much dynamism and freedom we take for granted here in the U.S..
“If behavioral economics has taught us anything, it’s that humans are vulnerable to framing effects. In other words, how people make choices turns on seemingly irrelevant aspects of the situation, such as the order in which options are presented, the other (unchosen) options presented at the same time, which option is designated as the “default,” and so on.
The new paternalists, having learned this lesson well, frame the public policy debate in a way that encourages paternalistic interventions. They have done so in at least three ways.”
Click through for more. A lot of people have plans for you and me. A lot.
‘Here’s what I think is really bothering Cohn and other ObamaCare supporters. The purpose of those credits and subsidies is to shift the cost of ObamaCare’s community-rating price controls and individual mandate to taxpayers, so that consumers don’t notice them. When states prevent such cost-shifting, they’re not increasing the cost of ObamaCare — they’re revealing it’
‘Israel is once again at war, yet civilian life continues — more anxious, more subdued, but unpanicked and resolute. At this point, 23 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed in the violence, and Israel is taking the first steps toward a ground invasion.’
Despite the title, it’s reasonable. Are we in decline, and just fighting over the spoils?:
‘Or consider the secular vote, which has been growing swiftly and tilts heavily toward Democrats. The liberal image of a non-churchgoing American is probably the “spiritual but not religious” seeker, or the bright young atheist reading Richard Dawkins. But the typical unchurched American is just as often an underemployed working-class man, whose secularism is less an intellectual choice than a symptom of his disconnection from community in general.
What unites all of these stories is the growing failure of America’s local associations — civic, familial, religious — to foster stability, encourage solidarity and make mobility possible.’
Are we leading ourselves down the garden path towards old Europe? Which ideas will lead the way, at least in our politics?
Walter Russell Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest. He has a big vision with some holes in it, but it’s one that embraces change boldly.
