Partisanship in US Politics

I completely disagree that partisanship has increased recently in US politics.

For those engaged in them, the fights over politics have been bitter, deep-seated, and ongoing since the founding of the Republic (ask Alexander Hamilton!).

The difference is that until the mid- to late-80s, politics remained an insider sport.  Even as late as the first Reagan administration, 'government' was the exclusive province of long-term politicians, covered by reporters of a very limited number of news services, who were equally-long-serving.

Suddenly in the 80s there was 'talk radio' - a commercial response to the public's long-perceived leftish bias in corporate media systems - actively prying into the minutiae of the daily affairs of Washington.  A careful minuet of positions, negotiations, and alliances-of-convenience was disrupted by the blundering commentary of ill-informed entertainers posing as journalists, cheerfully inciting voter outrage by simplistic commentary on complicated and subtle issues.  Professional media organizations, with their instinctive defensiveness, only reinforced the 'outsider', and 'underdog' position of the talk-radio circuit

Certainly any democracy has a certain amount of grandstanding; nevertheless national government was historically an ongoing process of backroom deals, tit for tat, and compensatory back-scratching....no longer.   Never mind that compromise is the life blood of governance.

Later, the internet's ability to allow anyone to take the position of these talk-radio hosts - to "tell a story" unfiltered to tens of millions of people within moments, now coupled with a public whose general  educational level is lower than ever means that for the political class - for whom maintaining their public image and position is always uppermost - is almost forced to become more strident, more aggressive, and more reactionary to inoculate themselves against whatever might leak out.

Some degree of transparency is essential to good governance.  The brilliance of the US Constitution is that it ASSUMES politicians are scoundrels and will be self-interested.  But naked democracy is NOT constructive; not everyone can bear watching sausage be made.  And yes, I'm asserting that the general public is too uninformed and too distracted by daily life to make well-reasoned judgments on nuances of public policy.

The 24/7 news media makes every piece of trivia an issue.
The internet practically makes every issue a public plebiscite.
And we're surprised that demagogues control our public discourse?  Really?

America's new place in the world.

This is in response to a few posts I've seen about the US "falling behind" - in particular, someone said that the US is doomed "welcome to 3rd world America".

Instead of saying "welcome to 3rd-world America", say instead "welcome to prewar America".

Seriously - the ongoing wailing about "the US is falling behind" is getting a little tiresome.

First, lets dispense with US exceptionalism.  I love my country, and there are a number of notably special things about its situation geographically, culturally, historically, etc that make it a unique place but Americans are not (and have never been) intrinsically smarter, prettier, faster, stronger, or any way different than any other cross-section of humanity.  We have the same proportions of brilliant scientists and racist a-holes as pretty much any other random bunch of 330 million people you'd gather in the world.

Secondly, and more directly to my point - to fear the US 'falling behind' speaks to a staggering level of ignorance of the last 100 years of world history.

In 1912 - a mere 100 years ago - the list of great powers in the world would have been Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria/Hungary, and only marginally, the USA.  The US was a largely agrarian country of mostly first-generation immigrants, late industrializing and largely disconnected with Old World affairs.

Yet after two catastrophic continent-spanning conflicts in 25 years (and a not-insignificant influenza epidemic), the three leading European states were prostrate - two from their almost-Pyrrhic victory (UK, France), one lay dismembered and occupied after being pummeled nearly into dust (Germany) - one of the powers entirely ceased to exist (A/H), one emerged from civil war at least superficially changed (Russia - USSR), one emerged from nowhere (Japan), and only one was basically unscathed - the United States.

In the two conflicts total deaths over the span of these listed powers totalled something more than 50 million.  US fatalities were approximately 500,000.  Possibly more significantly, the wars had completely devastated the industrial, technological, and even cultural infrastructure of the old world, with the subsequent Cold War arguably further contributing - paralyzing truly independent European development for 4+ decades.

The US was in the historically-unique position of being a superpower by default, not by inclination.  US armies had not marched all over the world subjugating enemies, conquering colonies, and gathering territory for the motherland.  (Certainly the US had engaged in its own efforts in colonialism like other Powers of the day, much of it naked military conquest barely cloaked as 'liberatory' exercises.)  But it's clear that even the burgeoning jingoism of the early-20th-century US wasn't posed as a challenge to the Great Powers, except insofar as it was competitive to Old World efforts to colonize and dominate the largely-unexploited Western Hemisphere.  Instead, the US was largely aimed at internal development, a patronizing benevolence toward other peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and essentially (even as late as the early 20th-century) a *revolutionary* geopolitical stance vis a vis the Old World states and their efforts to "lock down" most of the undeveloped world into agreed-upon exclusionary spheres of influence.

For emerging in 1945 as the dominant superpower on the planet, it should be astonishing that the US began the 20th century with a second-rate navy and almost no army to speak of.

In fact, as a superpower, one might point out that the US has been particularly clumsy.  Certainly, many anti-Americans (and we've generated many of them) would point to the scores of bad US foreign policy decisions as clear signs of its essentially-malignant nature; in point of fact, most if not all were simply colossal blunders born of a government run by unsophisticated and unsubtle men born and raised in a country that was (in their day) fairly irrelevant.  Wilson's naivete in insisting on national boundaries in post-WWI Europe almost guaranteed non-self-sufficient states vulnerable to Caesarist populism.  Read about the WW2 conferences between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR - FDR, for all his (American-style) urbanity, was often easily manipulated by the others.  No state's foreign policy is without mistakes, certainly.  But as US arrogance grew in the 1950s and 1960s, our clumsy, shortsighted and usually reactionary choices often ran roughshod over our own interests.

The fact that the US emerged later from the Cold War as the sole superpower speaks more to the intrinsic contradictions (and weakness) of the Soviet system and the inherent systemic benefits of capitalism, than to any particular cleverness of US policies.  Like 50 years earlier, the US didn't "win" the Cold War so much as "remain standing" when its opponent finally collapsed - mostly, I'd argue, as a result of America's geographic situation with abundant resources and a nearly-unassailable location, and (one of the few attributes I'd characterize as a generally unique feature of American culture) and an entrepreneurial and independently-minded populace .

The point is that now - roughly 2 decades after the Cold War ended with a whimper, and 2 full generations since WW2 - the Old World has finally essentially recovered.  European states no longer act as simple proxies for Superpower policies, they have formed their own agglomeration that allows them finally to pursue truly independent foreign policy.  (Further, it's not trivial that much of what's left of the US industrial base is pre-WW2, when European infrastructure is a good 20-30+ years younger.)

So in this broader context it shouldn't surprise anyone that the US, which has always been a deeply religious, insular country EXCEPT when superpowerhood was thrust upon it (and which it wore fairly uncomfortably), is losing its dominance in technology, economy, etc.  Not much here has changed, everyone else is returning to normal.

As a Minnesotan, one of the least-attractive characteristics of my fellow-staters is often a seemingly-pathological need to be "noticed".  We're considered flyover country by the bulk of the population on both coasts, and this seems to activate a sense of insecurity and a need for attention.  I see a disappointing parallel in histrionic comments from Americans arguing "we're not falling behind!".  Sure we are, if you want to put it that way.  I'd rather recognize that finally the rest of the world has recovered.  I'd rather be enjoying the fruits of being in the middle of a pack of successes, than being the sole superpower upon which the rest of the world depends.

Patience is the only cure, really

Uncertainty, and an obviously economically-illiterate president has businesses paralyzed.

Businesses can even survive high taxation - not well, and not broadly, but they CAN function in almost any environment, witness the black market - BUT THEY WON'T ACT WITHOUT A REASONABLY PREDICTABLE OUTCOME.

Uncertainty is the worst possible situation, and because businesses have
a) no idea WTF he's going to propose next, although it'll probably be bad for them
b) if any of the nonsense he spouts/supports is going to survive USSC scrutiny
c) what the democrats are going to do when their utopian idea of universal healthcare - even the tiny step towards it - gets (probably) shot down
d) what the underclass is going to do if/when obama fails to win in 2012, since they've been fed this pap that he's their savior.
e) no matter how bad we're at, Europe's even WORSE (so no refuge there) and as much as Asia appears stable, US mfg'rs are starting to figure out that doing biz in China is like drunkfoocking a fat chick, might feel great at the moment, but the consequences are ugly.  And as much as China != Asia, if China's giant house of cards starts to fall, well, then Asia's going to make the economic crisis in Europe look absolutely trivial.



This isn't rocket science.  This situation is tailor made for businesses to take their cash, bank it or invest in very quiet, very safe ways, and tell the government economists with all their fake 'incentives to grow' to go straight to hell until there is SOME course forward.

Right now businesses are turtling.  You don't get turtles to come out of their shell by hammering on their carapace and say "Hey, it's safe, come out now!"

The emperor has no clothes.

Let's agree on one basic fact: the US spends more than it takes in.

Now, whether your solution to resolve this is "take in more" or "spend less", I think the basic fact is true, yes?  We can agree on that?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in the entire recent crisis, this basic fact was conflated with another: if the credit rating agencies start to feel that there is a reasonable risk that we can no longer continue to juggle the books and keep paying our debt service, they will downgrade our security rating.

So there was the budget shortfall, and then there was an information question.

The 'deal' between the parties was essentially us 'proving' (we thought) that we could continue to juggle.  There was no ACTUAL immediate cut in any significant amount, nor any increase in revenue.

So S&P nevertheless downgraded the rating of the US.

On the right, they assert that the continuing, flawed economic state of the US is the reason for this.  They point to the root issue.
On the left, they assert that mainly it was about the information issue.  If Teabaggers hadn't caused such a fuss, the credit agencies would have continued to ignore the basically un-sound financials of the US (as they have for decades).

I don't know who's right.  The Left could have been correct - S&P seems so bunkum-stupid, they very well may have continued "what me worry" ratings-as-usual.

But it seems to me that it's pretty damn disingenuous for the Left to point to the Tea Party and say that they CAUSED this issue - that's simply attacking the guy who's pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.  It may have been inelegant and uncomfortable for him to do so, and to make a stink about it, but you can't really say he was wrong.

As far as I can tell, the left's argument is that we should have just kept pretending, then there wouldn't be a hassle, and the party could continue?

Gloom and Doom? Not really.

In response to a question about the US economic security:
"According to this article (http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/16/news...dex.htm?iid=EL), Tim Geithner believes that America will reach a financial bankruptcy unless the congress raises the debt ceiling. My question to you is, are you worried about what's about to happen and what are you overall thoughts?
I'm not trying to be malicious or anything. On the contrary, another financial crisis would affect the rest of the world as well."
My reply:

As long as Starbucks/Caribou/Dunn Bros continue to be successful selling $5 cups of coffee, we're fine.

In reality, while the economic indicators for the country are bad, those for the rest of the world are worse.  Ultimately, the stability of a currency is backed by perception, and the US (for all its utterly stupid policies, co-opted legislators of both parties, truly f*cked spending priorities, etc.) is far, far more stable by any meaningful measure than any comparable state.  This means that when the shat hits the fan, investors will continue to flee to the USD for security.  Now, the almost-certain money-flood that's coming from Congress (inconceivable that they suddenly grow testicles and learn to spend only what they have) guarantees that the USD value will plummet in the short term, but the fear of bond calls is grossly overblown; China might as well put a gun in its mouth before it crash-calls on US bonds which would simultaneously destroy the US economy and vaporize a significant fraction of China's wealth.

Further, as much as we cry about energy dependence, the Saudis understand it far better than the US public (and some policymakers) - the US is energy dependent only as a matter of convenience.  If I had any respect at all for our government, I'd say it was brilliant; the US has ample domestic coal, NG, and yes, even oil reserves for at least a century of current use.  Consuming Middle-Eastern oil first that's hard to ship, hard to protect, and closer to our enemies would be a geopolitical masterstroke.  Energywise, we're fine.  Foodwise, we're abundantly secure, grossly so.  In terms of strategic raw materials, again, we're amply supplied domestically, and only using those of other countries because their lower labor costs and our high environmental standards make them currently less-attractive to extract.  So if tomorrow a wall dropped around each country at its borders preventing any international movement or trade, 10 years later the US would still be almost perfectly unchanged.  I don't believe there are many other first-world states that could say the same thing.  Finally, physically, we're totally secure from even such (seemingly outdated) concepts as invasion.  There's no state (even China) that could credibly threaten the existence of the US for at least the next 50-100 years.

Such surplus and security has in fact probably allowed our government to survive such stupid decisions.

I could go on in detail for a while, but suffice to say that, barring some sort of threat of civil war, or a stunning change in circumstances for the EU*, Japan, Russia, or China, the US will remain the least-f*cked-up state with the best outlook in the developed world for at least 50 years.
* note particularly that the EU's prognosis is far worse than they let on; they are far less transparent than the US government, particularly in terms of the economic circumstances of the PIGS today.  Further, the EU has gotten a free-ride courtesy of the pre-collapse Soviet Union; the raising of the Iron Curtain gave Western Euro companies a nearby hinterland full of people desperate to work hard for low wages to fuel Euro commercial growth.  That honeymoon is almost over, as in the next decade workers in Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia wonder why they can't have the same standard of living, work, and wages of their French/German/British peers.

The histrionic pronouncements from Washington DC are politics, although the political brinkmanship is getting ever-more irresponsible.  I'm not saying that this country isn't past due for some much needed economic suffering (one can only operate on a fiscal premise of 'denial' for so long), but the struts underpinning the country itself are the same sturdy footings that foretold the US Great Power future in the 19th century.

China - not the threat it's painted to be.

What I'm really not clear on is what seems to be a apples-and-oranges comparison going on in the strategic community regarding the potential threat posed by China.

China - as it is - is not a military threat. Sure, it poses an economic threat, but this is largely of our own making, both in terms of debt burden (self-inflicted, and in extremis something that offers them leverage only as long as we accept it), currency (again, self-inflicted by world monetary authorities who refuse to hold China to 1st-world currency standards), etc. 

But while China is clearly a dominant power, one might even say a regional superpower, they utterly lack any ability to project this power outside their immediate region short of lobbing ICBMs. THIS is the defining point of a global superpower (and we discovered the limits of such all-or-nothing leverage from about 1950-1980). Granted, they have a billion-man army. They may even be 'unassailable' in conventional terms, and may able to impose their will militarily on any regional actor like Korea or Japan - that doesn't mean they're a threat to the US.

In short, people seem to be comparing China's 'turtled' strengths with the US's (over?)extended might, and concluding that logical extrapolation of the former means the two will be equivalent in a couple of decades.

Hardly. The threat of China as a 'global superpower' that can contend with the US worldwide, posited for 2035, 2050, 2025 depending on who you're talking to and what his agenda is, would HAVE to include projection capability...which itself introduces orders of magnitude of vulnerability and exposure. To suggest that the US has anything to actually fear from Chinese force-projection on THAT playground assumes an almost fanciful level of Chinese buildup (akin to late-1930's Germany) along with American inattention for a double-handful of decades at least.

No, we have to understand the Chinese buildup for what it is today: an expansion of capabilities certainly, an increased lethality in the neighboring seas which has the bargain double-purpose utility to China of both being useful against other regional entities as well as useful in denying US its (soon-to-be-former) ability to operate with impunity on the water, wherever it chose to. Did we really believe that was an eternal franchise anyway? Maintaining it (if even possible) would require colossal and nonsensical budgetary investments. But their denial of our ability to rummage through their front-pockets at will is hardly a threat to anyone outside of their arms' reach.

Certainly, our commitments to our regional partners require that we expend some effort to maintain our ability to operate in their behalf - to passively accept that certain seas are no-go zones would be foolish. But let's not confuse interests-at-one-remove with any actual denigration of our ability to defend ourselves, even if it seems convenient in an era of shrinking budgets to paint it so.

Ultimately, China won't be the only regional power whose capabilities circumscribe our operational capabilities near their shores, merely the first. We need a robust strategy to face these actors over the next century, and it cannot be by simply building more ships, planes, and subs - that's a dead-end strategy and vulnerable to technological breakthroughs that obsolete our massive investments in bulk (ala the cell-phone networks in the 3rd world vs. hardline phone systems in the 1st). I personally believe that the answer to this is going to be found in orbital capabilities, taking away the 'flatland' operational assumptions that inform a boundary-defining strategy anyway. But that's another subject, for another time.

Finally, the US Navy's assertions that we need to desperately fear the untested, nearly operationally useless* anti-ship ballistic systems despite their lack of actual testing is more likely to be a politically- or budgetarily-relevant assessment; it's hardly credible as a military one.

*the utility of a ballistic-missile-based antiship system is simply nil. Short of global thermonuclear war (where all gloves are off), the idea of a system with the relatively puny goal of sinking a single ship (even a really important one) appearing to all expected sensor systems as a potential ICBM is crazy. That would be as useful as making people think your switchblade is an assault rifle - simply bringing it out will immediately & grossly overescalate a confrontation to the point that your actual ability to inflict damage is made meaningless by the response you've inspired. It's politically useless. Thus the environment in which it could be deployed would already presuppose a complete all-out nuclear war in which case it would probably be more useful to actually HAVE a MiRV'd nuke warhead on that missile, rather than a single shipkiller ANYWAY. It just doesn't make sense, and the fact of China's pushing ahead with it suggests that either its a Potemkin challenge (unlikely they could pull that off for long) or a desperate dice-roll of a strategy being ironically validated by the US naval defense community's overreaction.

Enough already about "the cops are bad"

For the people whinging about the 'culture of corruption' and brutality of the police, I have a couple of points:

1) so far I have only seen utterly unsupported assertions - anecdotal evidence quoted as "a trend" or some stoner complaining that "all the cops are" (whatever). Further, any statistics that are shown tend to prove the opposite, that increasing allegations against police are NOT leading to more substantiated cases, are claimed to be "proof" that the cops "control" the system and protect their own from prosecution. Kind of like Global Warming, it's convenient when you posit something that all evidence can be twisted to support.

2) *nobody* making these claims can possibly know anything about the history of police departments and police work, particularly in urban areas. Compare 

a) police departments and systems of ombudsmen and recourse for - not to mention media and public sympathy for - people (particularly minorities, immigrants, etc.) who believe they've been mistreated today to say, the 1970s? The 1950s? The 1920s? The 1890s? Read about the police system in New York 1895-1897 when Teddy Roosevelt was NYC Police Commissioner. 

b) levels of procedure, both in terms of breadth and depth, applicable to police actions in dealing with the public today vs. the same dates. These procedures are almost universally meant to protect officers AND THE PUBLIC.

c) oversight and supervision of the 'beat cop' (or 'patrol officer' today) vs. the same dates.

d) the general level of violence used against suspects vs. the same dates. PARTICULARLY in terms of (admittedly subjective) the likelihood of lethal force being used against cops vs. the use of lethal force BY police, same timeframes.

e) corruption in law enforcement, same timeframes.


You might assert that today's police have attitude issues, are domineering, brutal, resort too quickly to brutal force and are just generally a-holes. I'd assert that a certain personality type has ALWAYS been drawn to police work, and that while police officers exhibit generally the SAME bell-curve of saints/sinners as any general population I'd concede that there probably is a little 'bubble' of personalities in the domineering/controlling area. HOWEVER, I'd simultaneously assert that this has absolutely not changed over time, while the systems emplaced over the last hundred years (and particularly in the last 20-30 years) *greatly* increase the ability of police departments to 'weed out' the outliers, psychotics, and general bad apples far better than they used to. (In fact, one could argue that for a long time, early police departments didn't really want to weed these guys out, except for the real crazies.)

In short, I think anyone who believes that police officers/departments are worse than before is either arguing from a position of complete ignorance of what "before" was like, and/or simply someone bearing a grudge against police for some slight or injustice (perceived or real, cops are of course not perfect) done to them.

This entirely disregards that I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that police officers jobs have gotten less stressful and less dangerous over time. This is a whole other issue that would sound too much like a defensive justification, so I haven't even gone into it here.