Nudge, Nudge. Change Nobody Wants

I saw an interesting article in the New Republic the other day, Nudge-ocracy, by Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber. It is long and wonky as New Republic articles often are, but it is informative and probably historically accurate.

The basic idea is that Obama and his team prefer policies of incremental change based on subtle interventions rather than grand strokes of policy. The authors conclude that

Obama has set out to synthesize the New Democratic faith in the utility of markets with the Old Democratic emphasis on reducing inequality. In Obama's state, government never supplants the market or stifles its inner workings--the old forms of statism that didn't wash economically, and certainly not politically. But government does aggressively prod markets--by planting incentives, by stirring new competition--to achieve the results he prefers. With health care, for instance, he would make it easier for employees to tote their insurance from job to job, eliminating the disincentive for insurers to invest in preventive care. Or take his bank plan, which helps banks dispose of their toxic assets, reducing uncertainty and making the banks more attractive to private investors--a far less drastic step than nationalization. Rather than force markets to conform to his wishes, he shapes their calculus so they conclude (on their own) that their interests coincide with his wishes.

The authors correctly trace this way of thinking back to the Carter presidency and the ideas of Charles Schultze. I think the roots of the situation go back a little deeper, though. The mainstream Democratic Party really hit a wall in the aftermath of the sixties. It came apart because of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement and the splits these events introduced into its coalition. In the aftermath of the Nixon/Watergate debacle, there was a missed opportunity to put things back together. Since then, it has been all downhill.

What we have to ask ourselves as people of the left, people who want to see real structural change in the way America works, is whether there is a real progressive program, and beyond that whether there is a progressive constituency. OK, there ought certainly to be one given the serious problems that exist in this society. But if you think about it there isn’t much there, or at least not much that percolates to the mainstream.

There are a lot of reasons for this, reasons that are pretty complex to be sure, but, in all honesty, recognition of this situation has to be the point of departure for progressives. There is a massive disconnection between the real situation of the country and the majority of its citizens and the political and media elite, really of both parties, but my own concern and preoccupation is with the Democrats or actually the progressive or left Democrats.

So in this context, one wonders exactly what this wonky ideology has to do with political and social reality. I hate to get down on Obama and his team. They are certainly better than the right-wing alternatives. But you have got to wonder whether people are going to take to the barricades over the portability of health insurance or presumptive 401-K participation. Not that these are not laudable or harmless initiatives, but are these the lessons we have learned from the past three decades of American history?

The question here, and the real objection to this kind of back-door social engineering is who is going to drive it, what class or interest carries this agenda? If we are honest, there is no significant social group behind it beyond a segment of the political and academic elite.

After seven pages of beating about the bush, the New Republic authors finally reach a sense of uneasiness with the program.

The health care plan suffers from a similar Rube Goldberg quality. For example, the "public option" sounds like an elegant way to improve quality by promoting competition. If only it were so simple. The problem is that private insurers have every opportunity to game the system: By skimming off the youngest, healthiest patients and leaving the rest for the government to cover, they drive down their own costs and make the public option look outrageously expensive by comparison. To prevent this, the government would have to restrict the way private insurers woo patients--something that's not impossible, but definitely tricky, given the variety of subtle techniques for screening out the sick. At a certain point, it seems far less complicated to just expand Medicare to everyone. The irony here is hard to miss: In order to keep its hands mostly off the free market, the Obama administration sometimes has to hatch schemes so convoluted they'd make an ambitious social planner blush.

Which raises a final objection: What's so great about private insurers or the people who currently run our banks? We are, after all, talking about a banking industry that tred a global financial meltdown and which, according to the IMF, may be sitting on trillions in losses to show for it. We're talking about a private health insurance industry that leaves almost one-sixth of the U.S. population without coverage and is a major reason we pay more for health care on average than any other country and get only mediocre results in return.

Bingo! It took these guys a long time to figure this out, although in the last paragraph they successfully pull all their punches and then some. But heh, here’s why this stuff is some much baloney. It is a rehash of the old complaint about the Fabians. It is, at bottom, change that nobody wants.

That’s the first objection. The second is perhaps even more cogent. These schemes are by and large dependent on congressional action. To the extent that they affect significant sectors of the economy, like banks and insurance companies, for example, the sectors affected have a disproportionate power to mitigate or resist reform, whatever subtlety or intellectual trickery is involved. They know what is really in their interests and they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists to figure it out and communicate it to our representatives. Most of Congress is there in some measure due to their contributions. So when things get serious, they have the consolation of pretty much owning most of the media and most of Congress.

Now Obama is uniquely suited to the role of tribune of the people, but until he gets a stomach for it, we are unlikely to see much of real significance happen.

Mixed Messages

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.”
Dick the Butcher, Henry VI

I was appalled to note that President Obama went out of his way to address the CIA and to assure them they were doing a bang-up job in a hard world, blah, blah, blah. One wonders what sort of change we are dealing with when it is necessary to reassure historically dysfunctional agencies that everything is really OK.

But then it is rather becoming a habit for the Obama administration, despite possessing a considerable mandate for a program of change, however nebulous, to govern as if that mandate did not exist, as if, in fact, the Democrats had lost the election. I don’t want to get into some kind of psychological explanation of all this, but leaving aside the personal experiences of Obama himself, a great many of the men and women who have come to power with him are veterans of the Clinton administration or have had their ideas formed by the experience of the Clinton years. And, of course, that was the case then.

It is good to see that the left and the blogoshere, with the exception of a few lawyers who insist on reducing the debate to the issue of whether Obama is legally compelled to prosecute the torturers or whether he just ought to, has come down, after the obligatory soul-searching, pretty much on the side of virtue. This is a start, a step for us in the right direction.

Speaking of lawyers, it would appear that the President has inched closer to the Shakespearean solution alluded to above by implying he would be amenable to throwing Bush’s lawyers under the bus. It’s a start, and an indication that pressure from the left can have at least a minimal result.

But reading through his remarks both at the CIA and in his later amendatory news conference, one still sees evidence of the kind of delusional thinking that has got us into so many impossible situations as a nation, the idea that we live in a world surrounded by enemies, powerful enemies, and that we are engaged in some sort of dark struggle and that, moreover, the guys who fight it are not thugs but unsung heroes.

Every now and again, as in his discussion of the real threat that Chavez poses to American interests, that is, none, we get a glimmer that somehow this man and his administration have a deeper connection to reality than the average Republican, which, of course, is none, but these flashes of reason need to become a good deal more commonplace before any of us can rest easy.

Whose Side Are We On?

I was heartened to see good and forthright and informative posts from David Bromwich at Huffington Post and Digby and dday at Hullabaloo, among others, but on the whole the reaction from the blogosphere to Obama’s torture memo speech has been disappointing.

Why are decent men and women still looking for excuses and exculpatory arguments when it comes down to core values and issues that used to define this country and its way of life in contradistinction to the rest of the world?

When we talk about moving forward and reconciliation, what Obama seems to be talking about is not something even remotely resembling the processes that took place, for example, in the aftermath in South America or South Africa. These were genuine attempts at healing and reconstruction within the polity itself, within the sovereign nation. They were based on the recognition of guilt and error.

No, this stuff is just empty rhetoric, as is so much of what passes as national dialogue these days. The reconciliation that our politicians speak of is simply an agreement among the political class to let bygones be bygones.

I don’t think enough of a point has been made of what really happened during the whole fiasco of the Bush torture years, and what is really being revealed in its aftermath. Not to put too fine a point on it, these memos were solicited by a group of practitioners within the CIA for the express purpose of obtaining a legal cover for actions of dubious legality.

Lots of people in the intelligence and law enforcement and military establishments opposed this stuff, most notably, in this context, the FBI operatives at Guantanamo, hardly a source one might expect to be staffed by softhearted liberals. So by giving these guys a pass, aren’t we simply completely the circle? We are not talking about innocent conscripts here. We’re talking about people whose primary concern was not the moral dilemma that besets everyone who wields power, but was rather to find a legal cover for illegal and immoral acts, a cover kindly provided by the tortuous reasoning of Bush’s legal team.

Putting aside the issue of prosecution, what no one has suggested is how ripe these organizations are for what amounts to a purge. Far from letting the past stay in the past, at a minimum, these people should be kicked out, separated from the service just like that. There is a culture within the CIA that is just so wrong it cannot be tolerated in a democratic state. I don’t want to be reconciled to that culture, and I suspect anyone who does.

There is a fundamental obscenity at the heart of the exercise of power. All the great literatures and all the great political thinkers have somehow had to grapple with its inherent contradictions. Those of us on the left in America need to start getting back to basics, to start thinking straight.

I read a speech recently by the Japanese novelist Haruki Mirukami. He basically said that he was always on the side of the weak and the powerless, on the side of the egg, no matter how flawed, against the system, against the wall. That’s how I feel now. Those of us who want real change should never give in. We should never be reconciled. We should never make excuses. We should avoid being practical. We should never give comfort or faith to those whose fingers are on the trigger. We should never feel comfortable behind the gun. And we should not permit those who hold the guns to ever feel complacent.