Archive for Politics
Fewer Young Voters Self-Identify as Democrats
The New York Times reports that fewer young people (ages 18-29) self-identify as Democrats. Based on Pew data, the percentage of young people who identify or lean Democrat has dropped from 62 percent at the peak in July 2008 to 54 percent late last year.
While the bad economy and lack of jobs is no doubt weighing heavily on young people’s minds, this raises a question. If many young people lean Democrat, but when the economy is bad lean Republican, what exactly are they?
In the “Libertarian Vote in Age of Obama,” David Boaz and I presented evidence that many of these young people can fairly be called libertarian–that is socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. True, many young libertarians got swept up in the excitement over the Obama campaign, voting 59 percent for Obama to 36 percent McCain. But, we argued, all the talk of a generational realignment towards Obama and the Democrats was premature.
This generation of young people are particularly prone to disillusionment. And we hypothesized that if the economy stayed bad, many young people, particularly the more libertarian young people, would sour on Obama and jump ship. Perhaps we’re now seeing some evidence that confirms this.
However, I don’t think Republicans are out of the woods yet. Even if young people vote against Democrats in 2010, Republicans will need to provide a credible alternative that addressed the concerns of a more libertarian-leaning generation of potential young voters. This will be a long-term challenge for a Republicans.
A defining idea for academia: jobs
With regulators forcing for-profit-colleges to disclose more data, and the industry facing increased scrutiny, at least you can say that for-profits attempt to train many graduates for jobs. In an article for the Chronicle Review this week, Camille Paglia, argues that traditional four-year colleges should be doing the same:
“Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics…. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings… every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.”
Could “progressive conservative” work in the US?
Thinking about liberalism in Europe, Tim Lee writes:
The [recent] British and German experiences also provide support for the Boaz/Kirby argument about the libertarian vote in the US. The FDP and Lib Dems have historically gotten around 10 percent of the vote, on par with Boaz and Kirby’s estimates of the size of the libertarian vote in the United States. Boaz and Kirby also argued that the political effectiveness of libertarians is maximized when libertarians aren’t too closely tied to either end of the political spectrum. A credible threat to walk away from the Republican Party and support Democrats will give both major parties an incentive to take libertarian voters. That certainly seems to be confirmed by recent developments in the UK, where the Liberal Democrats were able to push their coalition government in a direction more friendly to civil liberties.
It occurs to me that there’s another way libertarians in the US could learn from the British example. In the US, the libertarian movement has been tarnished by the confusion over the word “libertarian,” and its many negative connotations. In Britain, David Cameron described his vision for liberalism as “progressive conservatives.” While libertarians wouldn’t agree with everything on Cameron’s agenda, could this be a better label for the libertarian brand in the US?
What are the most libertarian states?
Jason Sorens over at the The Fund for American Studies blog has a series of interesting posts attempting to identify the most libertarian states. Using factors that include Ron Paul’s vote share, the number of Ron Paul donors per state, Libertarian Party vote in the 2008 presidential election, and other variables, he concludes:
The states with the most libertarians are Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Idaho, with Nevada, Indiana, Georgia, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Utah, California, and Colorado following.
Thanks, George W Bush, for the BP escrow fiasco
In today’s New York Times, David Sanger analyzes President Obama’s expansive use of the presidency not as a bully pulpit but to act as planner/shareholder/dad-in-chief:
But President Obama’s successful move to force BP to establish a $20 billion compensation fund that the company will have no voice in allocating — just a down payment, the president insisted — may have been the most vivid example of what he recently called his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.”
With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach. It is an argument that has come to define Mr. Obama’s first 18 months in office, and one that Mr. Obama clearly hopes to make a central issue in November’s midterm elections.
The real issue here isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — the “size and scope” of government, to employ that chestnut. What’s really frightening about the way that Obama sees his role as unconstrained by law or regulation on what he can or cannot do. If the president decides that a private company should establish an escrow fund with the federal government, he doesn’t need a law or regulation to set up how this works. He just needs what Rahm Emanuel calls “a power other presidents have used — you call it jawboning.”
It may make every bit of sense for companies that drill offshore to, in the case of an environmental catastrophe, have an escrow fund managed to pay the victims of their recklessness, carelessness, or bad luck. And as Richard Epstein argued, BP doesn’t deserve to have its liability capped.
But if this is the case, there should be some kind of legal or regulatory means for addressing this. A whim of the president is not, in a country that can meaningfully be said to be governed by the rule of law, sufficient basis for this. And by putting the money in an “escrow fund,” it gives the illusion that there’s some kind of contractual or due process mechanism at play here. There isn’t. Procedure matters in a liberal democracy; getting to the “right result” isn’t enough.
Of course, Obama couldn’t do this if his predecessor hadn’t teed up such a perfect shot for him. So well done, Republicans. Your insistence that the “unitary authority” of the president allowed him to imprison and execute at will has been reapplied from real people to the legal persons that are corporations. Nothing Obama’s doing is inconsistent with the Bush doctrine on presidential power. The target has merely shifted. Heck, it’s really just a continuation of existing Bush administration policy: Hank Paulson did the same thing when forcing banks to take TARP money, though at least TARP could hide behind the fig leaf of congressional action.
Somewhere from his lair on Skullcrusher Mountain, Dick Cheney is smiling. And remember, libertarians told you so.
International soccer and fiscal policy
The list of countries that qualify for the World Cup is always a motley one. There’s Brazil playing against just-got-in and didn’t-register-properly North Korea, which Radley Balko suggested fielded a side with eight Kim Jong-Ils. Over in Group E there’s defending world champions Italy, we’d-rather-be-playing-rugby New Zealand, Slovakia (motto: “No, sorry, you’re looking for Slovenia; they’re in Group C; no bother, it’s a common mistake”), and Paraguay (notice that every country ending with “guay” qualified for the World Cup).
Qualifying for the World Cup is a big deal and source of national pride (except in the United States). Could this pride be leveraged for macroeconomic ends? I have a modest proposal.
The Stability and Growth Pact limits the ability of Eurozone countries to run excessive deficits and incur excessive debts. Supposedly. As we’re seeing in Greece, it doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job at this. And Greece is far from the only country to openly flout the Pact.
Would World Cup disqualification work any better? That is, what if FIFA or the regional governing bodies (like UEFA) only certified for World Cup participation countries that adhered to some basic rules of fiscal discipline, keeping their deficits in check and debt below some reasonable percentage of GDP?
It wouldn’t be unprecedented. After all, in club soccer,
Obviously this isn’t foolproof, and surely there will be countries that game the system. But it would at least allow the exclusion of countries like Greece who threaten the financial stability of an entire continent. To mix my sport metaphors, Greece deserves some time in the penalty box. That need not be executed just by diplomatic means.
Since the endogenous costs of reckless fiscal policy don’t seem to effectively dissuade countries from marching into the abyss, perhaps the damage to national pride accompanying disqualification from international soccer’s biggest quadrennial tournament would prove more effective.
California: America’s bread basket and food regulator
Baylen Linnekin has published a new law review article that you should read if you care about your right to eat whatever you want. He points out that California is leading the charge in regulating and banning politically incorrect foods, including hollandaise sauce and Caesar dressing, taco trucks and other street foods, eggs, raw milk, trans fats, and many others. This should worry the rest of us because as goes California, so goes the nation. For example, California was the first state to ban foie gras, and soon other jurisdictions followed suit, including famously Chicago.
Before reading Baylen’s article, I had no idea that California was responsible for so much of our food production. When you think of America’s bread basket, you tend to think of the midwest, but in fact it is California:
The sheer volume and variety of crops grown in California defy overstatement. The state leads the nation in production of almonds and walnuts and seemingly every crop alphabetically in between. In addition to almonds and walnuts, California is America‘s sole producer—meaning it is home to ninety-nine percent or more of the country‘s overall production—of figs, raisins, olives, clingstone peaches, persimmons, prunes, pomegranates, sweet rice, and clover seed. The state leads the nation in production of asparagus, avocados, bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cut flowers, dates, eggplant, garlic, grapes, herbs, kiwi, lemon, lettuce, lima beans, melons, nectarines, onions, pears, pistachios, plums, raspberries, strawberries, turnips, and more than a dozen other crops. All told, California farms account for nearly half of America‘s domestic production of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. California growers ship the vast majority of these crops to other U.S. states. California also accounts for all of America‘s nut exports, and three out of five fruit and vegetable exports.
California also has the most vibrant restaurant industry in the country. To me, this begs the question: If California’s agricultural and food industry is so massive why hasn’t it successfully organized to block food regulation? Is it simply the case that green lobby is much bigger?
War + Lithium = Democracy. The Aristocrats!
The United States has discovered a trillion-dollar trove of metals in Afghanistan:
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberries.
Referring to a country as “the Saudia Arabia of” anything hardly augurs well for its future since Saudi Arabia is, well, a theocratic petrostate whose rulers virtually imprison a group of foreign workers whose numbers total about a third of the kingdom’s population and whose native population is subject to the whims of a fascist religious police that, among other feats, murdered fourteen schoolgirls in 2002, prohibiting them from leaving a burning school building because they were not sufficiently veiled.
Afghanistan is not a country that has always been an anti-modern failed state, but one that was at one time, not so long ago, a relative symbol of progress and liberalism in the Muslim world. So moving to being the Saudia Arabia of central Asia isn’t really a great step forward.
Perhaps Afghanistan can join Nigeria or Venezuela in the list of countries whose natural resources have done so much to initiate prosperity, growth, and opportunity. But “central Asia’s Nigeria” doesn’t really have much of a ring to it.
For the umpteenth time: natural resources are not an unalloyed good that move a country from poverty to prosperity. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the rule of law and favorable institutions have a lot more to do with it than minerals. Given that the Soviets, then the Taliban, and now the US are presiding over an effectively broken institutional climate in Afghanistan, the discovery of mineral deposits is nothing to cheer about. In many ways, it’s a step backwards. At least for the people of Afghanistan.
Wrong method to identify libertarians
George Mason University economist Dan Klein had an op-ed in yesterday’s WSJ arguing that the Left flunks Econ 101. Using data collected by Zogby, Klein argues that liberals perform worse than conservatives or libertarians on a series of eight questions testing basic economic concepts. The longer paper that inspired the op-ed is here.
Nate Silver criticizes the question wording and survey instrument here. I just wanted to add a quibble with the method Zogby continues to use to identify libertarians. Zogby includes the word “libertarian” as an option in the traditional conservative-moderate-liberal ideology question. Using this method, Zobgy finds that about 7% of respondents are libertarian. And while this is certainly an improvement over the traditional method, it still underestimates libertarians by at least half. David Boaz and I have shown that between 14% and 23% of Americans hold libertarian beliefs. But data shows that there is much confusion about the word libertarian and that the word remains unfamiliar to many people who hold libertarian beliefs.
There is a better method to parse out ideology to identify liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. David Boaz and I have suggested using a three question screen to identify ideology, combining the best question wording from Gallup and the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies. Researchers at TargetPoint and Politico used this method to parse out ideology in survey of Tea Party participants, finding that half were libertarian and half conservative. The questions are:
- I am going to ask you to choose which of two statements I read comes closer to your own opinion. You might agree to some extent with both, but we want to know which one is closer to your own views: The less government, the better; or, There are more things that government should be doing. [ANES]
- We need a strong government to handle today’s complex economic problems; or, The free market can handle these problems without government being involved. [ANES]
- Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view? [Gallup]
Of course, additional polling questions cost money. And three questions cost more than one. So if I had to choose only two, I’d pick 2 and 3.
Still, ideology matters. And pollsters do their clients a disservice if they overlook important trends in ideology that make a difference in reading the electorate. For instance, I suspect that pollsters would have detected the rise of the Tea Party, or at least better understood it’s causes and roots, if they had been using this method earlier.
June 8 poll closing times
A blogger at Firedoglake posts a helpful chart of closing times for states having primaries today, with links to the states’ elections bureaus or equivalents. I haven’t checked it but none of the commenters suggested it was inaccurate. I’ve pasted it here:
| State w/ SOS or Elections resource link | Polling place opening and closing times |
| Maine | Opening varies, 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m; all close 8:00 p.m. EDT |
| New Jersey | 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. EDT |
| South Carolina | 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT |
| Virginia | 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. EDT |
| Arkansas | 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. CDT |
| Iowa | 7:00 a.m. To 9:00 p.m. Statewide CDT |
| Montana | Believed to be 7 a.m. to 8 p.m (Missoulian.com) MDT |
| North Dakota | Highly dependent on size of town and location; According to Green Papers:
“Polls close asynchronously at 9:00p CDT (0200 UTC) / 9:00p MDT (0300 UTC). Voting places open between 7:00a to 12:00n and remain open until 7:00p to 9:00p depending on the size of the town. The western half of the state is in MDT but that is, of course, the more sparsely populated part of the state, so it is not as problematic to the networks as might be otherwise suggested by simple geography.” See downloadable XLS at state website. |
| South Dakota | Believed to be 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. MDT – confirm with SD-SOS |
| California | 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. PDT |
| Nevada | Believed to be 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. (see NRS 293.273) PDT |
To represent it another way, here are states by closing time (all times Eastern):
7 PM: South Carolina, Virginia
7:30 PM: Arkansas
8 PM: Maine, New Jersey
9 PM: South Dakota (?)
10 PM: Iowa, Montana, Nevada (?)
11 PM: California
Times are all over the place in North Dakota; nobody will close a poll until I blow this whistle.
If anyone has any corrections, please post them in the comments.
Democratizing the takedown of BP
The New York Times, always fresh to break a scoop, reports on the BPGlobalPR Twitter feed, which for the last several weeks has been offering up scathingly hilarious takes on what is quickly taking the mantle of America’s largest-ever environmental disaster:
The parody site is updated throughout the day, offering a combination of “everything is going exactly according to plan” P.R. speak, macabre humor and occasional glimpses of genuine outrage.
Over the last week, BPGlobalPR boasted of a deal on “blackened shrimp” at BP gas stations, linked to the photographs of oil-soaked pelicans with the out-of-character postscript “warning: truly heartbreaking” and spoke of how “we’ve modestly made modest changes to this modest gulf.”
Beyond its followers, BPGlobalPR benefits from retweeting, becoming grist for other Twitter feeds. On Saturday, this cynical packet — “Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no — profits, image, then safety, but still — it’s right up there” — was bounding its way across the Internet.
But, the Grey Lady warns you, just because something is on The Twitters doesn’t make it legitimate:
Knowing who’s who on Twitter has been a challenge since the beginning: the basketball great Shaquille O’Neal created his own Twitter feed, with the insistent handle The_Real_Shaq, after someone was pretending to be him. The impersonations had become so problematic that Twitter created “verified accounts” last year assuring followers that the person controlling the account was the real deal.
Far be it from me to cast aspersions on people who use Twitter for comedic ends. Having received an order to cease and desist from a foreign government for allegedly impersonating one of their ministers on Twitter, I am no citadel of righteousness when it comes to tweets.
But the Times buried the lede here. It’s well-known that on Twitter, as elsewhere on the internet, satire (in its better forms) and fraud (in its black hat variety) run rampant. Only in the final paragraphs does the article get to the transformative aspects of this:
While satire has always been with us, certainly longer than public relations executives have been, the Internet is democratizing the process, said Miriam Meckel, a professor of communications in Switzerland who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard studying the impact of Twitter and social media services on journalism.
And that is the real story here. Bursting the bubble of a pompous company is nothing new; being able to do it and have 11 times as many followers (that is, market share) as the object of your derision is what’s new. Blogs, social media, Twitter, et cetera provide myriad ways for normal folks to, if not comfort the afflicted, at least afflict the comfortable. And there are few better ways to hold power — whether in the form of political leaders, firms, or self-appointed social saviors — to account. No longer can a powerful, politically connected company like BP attempt to spin and manage its way out of wrecking hundreds of miles of coastline. This is changing brand management in a way we don’t, I think, fully understand.
It’s not that the facts are getting out. It’s that the Zeitgeist is being established independent of any entity with which BP can directly plead, cajole, or threaten. We are crowdsourcing the establishment of the snarky, ironic conventional wisdom. And in many ways, this is a much more powerful thing than the rise of mere fact-reporting bloggers.
It’s not just about reporting, which is how Web 2.0 (for lack of a better term) has largely been discussed. This isn’t the democratization of information. It’s the democratization of the takedown, the skewering, the needling. This is not the news media being disintermediated — it’s the professional satirists in the vein of Mencken and Rogers and Jon Stewart being replaced by amateurs, and lots of them. It makes it harder for any big entity or brand to remain hallowed and righteous for very long.
On a more prosaic level, we saw this as well with Helen Thomas over the last week. After declaring her wish for the Levant to be Judenfrei, she tried to back out and apologize. And in an earlier era, she might have been able to control the news cycle long enough for it to be buried. The facts here were never in dispute; she was caught on a Flip camera, so chalk that up as a victory for Web 2.0 as we understood it five years ago. But over the weekend she was so badly skewered by thousands of satirists (sample Twitter #helenthomasmovies titles: “10 Things I Hate About Jews,” “Goys Don’t Cry”) that today she was forced to resign from, well, whatever it was that she did.
The BP oil spill is the first major national event where the bad guy in question is subject to lampooning not just from a satirical elite but by anyone with the material and the gumption to set up a Twitter account, or hell, create a funny hashtag. Democratizing the news was a step forward. Democratizing our skepticism towards all form of power is an even greater step.
David Frum on the Bilderberg Group
The Bilderberg Conspiracy apparently met this weekend in Sitges, Spain. What? You’ve never heard of Sitges? That’s because the Bilderbergers made it up. It’s not a real city. They even went so far as to make up a Wikipedia page for it; there’s even one in Catalan! They also invented a backstory for it and got a whole bunch of gay people to claim that it’s a great destination for a beach vacation. Now that’s thorough, though it doesn’t fail the descamisados who know the truth.
Once again, I was not invited. However, David Frum spent some time at the Bilderberg Group in the 1990s as a guest of Conrad Black. (Presumably, Lord Black was not in attendance this year, as he’s currently in a federal prison in Colorado, where he seems to be having a fine old time.)
I don’t mean that Bilderberg meetings are boring. They aren’t, not especially. They are precisely as interesting as any other conference that focuses on global economic data, the urgency of European integration, and the ever-rising menace of populist conservatism in the United States. I cannot recall ever hearing anything said in off-the-record conversations that the person speaking would not have said on-the-record….
The idea of Bilderberg as a shadow world government is rather funny. Bilderberg itself demurs, on grounds that the group only hosts discussions, never adopts resolutions or anything like that. But that’s not the real rebuttal. Unlike Davos, Bilderberg is a membership organization: Most attendees return every year. Over time, this practice has given Bilderberg a distinct yesteryear quality. You were much more likely to meet an “ex” this or “former” that than anyone in office today. Guests too tended to reflect the interests and enthusiasms of prior decades. You wouldn’t meet Bono at Bilderberg. (Or rather – you wouldn’t have in the 1990s. Maybe you would now!)
For this reason, already it was true in the 1990s that Bilderberg felt itself being overtaken by glitzier competitors, especially the World Economic Forum in Davos. Nobody would ever describe Bilderberg as glitzy. Meetings were decidedly low-tech: panel discussions, not powerpoints. The group met in comfortable but hardly sumptuous resort hotels. Meals were served buffet style, with the group’s patron, the Queen of the Netherlands, carrying her own plate and joining the queue.
It was precisely the anachronistic quality of Bilderberg that always fascinated me most and that looms largest in my own memory.
Scene: I’m in the hotel bar after a Bilderberg session in Belgium. I get into conversation with an elderly fellow-attendee, a wealthy German businessman. Then: “You know, I was a Nazi.” Weren’t a lot of people? “Oh yes. But I was especially ardent. I volunteered for service in Russia.” What happened? “My parents were aghast. They thought the war was madness. They were influential people – and so my father got me an assignment as military attaché in Portugal. That’s the only reason I’m alive now.”
Tea Parties and future of politics
Don’t miss this AEI panel next Wednesday, June 9 at 2:00 about what the Tea Parties mean for the future of politics with Ross Douthat, Kristen Soltis, and Dave Weigel. Fun fact: Cheryl Miller, the organizer of this event, says
According to my highly unscientific count, they have the youngest average age (28!) of any AEI panel. If we include the moderator, Jonah Goldberg, we’re still at a record-making 31.
Hitch-22 out tomorrow
Christopher Hitchens’ long-awaited memoir Hitch-22 comes out tomorrow. (Fortunately, the publisher, Twelve, has seen fit to release it same-day on Kindle.) Here’s a partial list (below the fold) of what the reviewers are saying about it. I have it on pre-order; I only wish it had come out in time for the long Memorial Day reading weekend.
Robert Reich wants to nationalize BP
Robert Reich wants to nationalize BP’s American operations until President Obama can use his Magical President Powers to stop the oil leak.
What’s interesting is Reich’s evidence that this is kosher:
If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s North American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.
So, in other words, because we’ve already done it a couple of times, there’s no reason we can’t do it again. It turns out that in politics maybe one occurrence does make a pattern. Merely suggesting that something isn’t a precedent doesn’t make it so.
