Sunday, October 11, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, October 11, 2009 after watching selections from “The Chris Matthews Show,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.”

Salit: We watched a piece on the Lehrer NewsHour about the government response to some extreme youth violence in Chicago. The Attorney General Eric Holder and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education who is originally from Chicago, were there. Mayor Daley was there, who, by the way, looks so much like his father now. He didn’t used to when he was younger.

Newman: Well, he’s the same age his father was in 1968 when the whole world was watching.

Salit: Exactly. Two weeks ago a black teenager, Derrion Albert, was clubbed to death by other kids outside a school in Chicago. The officials put forward a series of initiatives to respond to this. They are trying to establish what the “metrics” are for profiling kids who will potentially engage in, or be the victims of, this kind of violence. They want to target 10,000 kids who meet that profile and intervene on their lives with mentoring, with programs of different kinds, the hope being that it will be preventative. It’s not a police action, but an intervention to try to put these kids on a good path. When you hear the talk about creating metrics so that you can identify the 10,000 kids most at risk and then intervene on their life path, how do you respond?

Newman: They already know who those kids are. So what’s the study about? Wouldn’t it be good to have a study of how come the vast sums of money that have already been spent on this has not produced significant gains? Shouldn’t that be studied? And shouldn’t they search out any programs which have been more effective and find out if those programs are being properly funded?

Salit: In this Chicago situation there are a number of other issues in the mix.

Newman: Like what?

Salit: One was that there’s a controversy on the impact of some of the school closings. When Education Secretary Arne Duncan was running the school system in Chicago, he closed a number of schools which were underperforming and they moved the kids into other neighborhoods to go to school. Some people are contending that they sent kids in one set of gangs into territory that’s controlled by other gangs. And that inflamed the tensions on the street. But insufficient attention was paid to that. The other issue is that the recession has impacted, as it has everywhere, on these communities. And you’re talking about communities that started out poor and they’ve gotten a lot poorer. The officials in Chicago seem to have come up with the idea that they’re going to identify 10,000 kids and they’re going to intervene with them.

Newman: With what? What are they going to intervene with?

Salit: They don’t really spell that out. Maybe that’s because they’re in the process of figuring that out, but I presume they will intervene with a mix of remedial programs in school and after-school programs of one kind or another. In Chicago, the mayor’s office has made a big investment in after-school programs, probably more than any other major urban center in the country.

Newman: Have they spoken to the gang leaders? I didn’t see any of them at the press conference.

Salit: No, they weren’t at the press conference. But I don’t really know if they’re talking to them.

Newman: Well, if Obama says he’s willing to speak to Ahmadinejad, then why shouldn’t somebody out there be ready to speak to the gang leaders?

Salit: That’s a good point. The attack on Derrion Albert in Chicago was captured on videotape. And some parents said the fact that it happened to be captured on videotape means that some people are going to be forced to draw attention to it, but this has been going on for a long time.

Newman: That’s probably not true.

Salit: What’s not true?

Newman: That some people will be forced to pay attention to it because it’s on videotape.

Salit: Maybe you’re right. The press conference was the usual stuff about how we have to use this moment to go forward. Duncan gave the speech that we’ve heard a million times. ‘This is a crossroads.’ But, when you ask, ‘Why don’t they talk to the gang leaders?’ it’s a very deep question. Take as an example, Dr. Lenora Fulani’s Operation Conversation: Cops and Kids program. There was a tragic incident in New York in which a young, unarmed African American man was killed by the police outside an after-hours club. There was a major uproar in response. And you and Dr. Fulani said, ‘Here’s what we need to do. We need to have the cops and the kids sit in a room and talk together and create some kind of conversation. Yes, we can talk about programs and legislation and training and so on and so forth, but how about if we get the people who are actually in these situations on the streets together and start a dialogue about all of what goes on.’ This program is now very highly commended by young people and the police for breaking down barriers between them. What makes it so hard to do those kinds of things?

Newman: That’s a very hard question. Let’s go back to the example of Obama and Ahmadinejad. There’s an attitude in this country which says that you can’t speak to an enemy, to Ahmadinejad, until he concedes all the things that are very important to him to not concede. That’s a strange attitude. Now, Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and I take that to be a recognition that there has to be a change in that attitude. That’s what he’s been doing, during his run for the presidency and since becoming president. There are a lot of influential forces who say, ‘Don’t give those criminals anything. Don’t give those bad guys anything.’ I think that’s fundamental to what keeps this going on and on and on and on. That’s why I think Obama is 1,000% right in saying we have to sit down with our enemies and talk to them. But it’s not the fashion to sit down with your enemies. There’s a posture that you’re supposed to adopt towards people who are anti-social. I don’t think that we should deny that they’re anti-social. But you have to sit down with anti-social people and find out what the hell is going on. You have to find a way to do that. I don’t think you’ll get anywhere by identifying 10,000 kids who profile this way and giving them all a couple of ping pong racquets and a ping pong ball. That doesn’t make a difference. I think you’ve got to sit down and genuinely discover, with a proper attitude – and it’s hard to find people who can do this – what’s bothering them. You have to sit down with them with an attitude that communicates we want to do something about this. Maybe they feel fine about being anti-social, but they are human beings and have other considerations in their lives and other needs in their lives. You can negotiate with them. You can talk to them. But in the poor communities, nobody’s doing that. Instead, we’re going to do a multi-million dollar study to identify the now and future troublemakers.

Salit: I’m sure if they went to the corner of 63rd and King Drive in Chicago, everyone on the street could give them the list right then and there.

Newman: Look, these bad kids are, in some way, gratified by being identified as bad kids. That’s what they get. I think that’s very ego gratifying. That seems understandable to me.

Salit: How does that work?

Newman: That’s the power that they have. These are people who are basically impotent in a very poor culture. It’s economically and socially poor. They don’t see many opportunities for making it out. And people like to be influential. People like to show you that their ideas, their activities make a difference. And these are the activities that give them a degree of social recognition. They gain that by exercising a kind of power at a very local level. That’s got to be understood and looked at and, at a minimum, they have to be included in the culture as opposed to being excluded from the culture.

Now, is that hard? It’s very hard. It’s even dangerous. The person who walks into the lion’s cage with angry lions has to know that the first thing you have to do is indicate that you want to be a friend. That doesn’t mean that you’re weak or that you’re not prepared to do whatever you need to do to protect yourself. But if that’s all you’re going to do, you may as well stay out of the cage because you’re not going to cool them out. People want recognition and they don’t want recognition conditionally. They want recognition as who they are. You have to be able to make human contact with them, despite the fact that you disagree with them. You have to find a common denominator.

Salit: How does Dr. Fulani do that in the Cops and Kids program?

Newman: Part of what works in Fulani’s Cops and Kids program is that they come together under her influence because there’s trust. She’s been there with the kids and with the cops and doesn’t compromise the fact that she believes in different things than they might, both the cops and kids. And she says to them, ‘We recognize you in this program. We need you both. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to find something in common.’ What’s in common? In common is that we’re human. That’s why when she has the cops and kids role-play a family buying a pet it’s so effective. They perform together. They perform something silly. One thing that human beings can do together is make fools of ourselves. She starts the workshops with the police officers and kids doing slow motion theater exercises together. They make funny faces. And they discover they can do that together. So it starts out with that and she creates off of that very, very small thing. But it’s not small, because the hard part was getting there, but they create a commonality, a sense of groupness. And relatively rapidly, it becomes possible for these people, not to make major changes in their world views, but to talk to each other.

If a kid says to the cop Pig! you think cops don’t know what that means? Or what that kind of talk is? They know how to talk hostile because they’re often pretty hostile people themselves. The cops say to the kids, When I see you with your pants down like that, I want to smack you upside the head. You think the kids don’t understand that? Obviously, they understand it. But do they understand the attitude behind it? Of course they do. If you can transform these things into performances, when you see what people are saying as performances, then most people can start to understand each other. If you see things as designed to get you to be intimidated and to bow down, then people can’t see it, can’t hear it. But if you see it as just a performance in a play, then people can hear it.

Salit: It’s more approachable.

Newman: Approachable. I don’t know what you mean by approachable.

Salit: If you see it as a performance, it doesn’t push you away in the same way.

Newman: It’s not because it doesn’t push you away. It’s that you’re now collectively doing the same thing. You’re all performing together. So it’s not a question of pushing away or not pushing away. That’s a cognitive way of talking about it. This is just what we’re doing. And we’re doing it together, so now we have a new creation, in a very particularized fashion, of a new mode of connection by virtue of the species identification. You go to a ball game and Derek Jeter gets a hit at a critical time and suddenly you’re standing up and cheering with the guy next to you who might be someone who, if you saw him in any other context, you’d be scared stiff of him or he’d want to punch you in the mouth because you’re black or Puerto Rican or whatever. But in the context of performing this thing together you’re suddenly on the same side. So, it’s a kind of “on the same sideness.” It’s not even a matter of hearing something that someone else is saying. That’s the reason why I’m objecting to the “approachable” term. You don’t hear it any better. You don’t think it’s more acceptable. It’s introducing into the picture a new mode, which is not cognitive, which is not filled with all the criteria of cognition and judgment, like “understanding better.” It has nothing to do with understanding. When I hear people say things like that, what I hear them saying is, For this to be comprehensible, we have to translate it into a cognitive mode. Otherwise, it’s not comprehensible. There’s that instantaneous reduction to a traditional mode. I’m saying that if you do that, you’re out of the ballgame. You’re misunderstanding from the get-go. What’s needed is a new mode of understanding and I think, in a way, that’s what Obama was getting at when he said that we need to talk with Ahmadinejad. It’s ironic. The most extreme Republicans and the most liberal Democrats talk about this sometimes when they say I just liked Ted Kennedy. We got along. John McCain can say that. There is something going on here that’s important to understand. These two guys, you put them on the floor of the U.S. Senate and they want a throwdown. You take them out and put them in a local Irish pub, and they’re hugging each other every 20 seconds. We don’t do enough negotiating at the local pubs. These official environments are enormously over-determining of the performances that people do and as long as people do those performances, there’s no understanding.

Salit: But how do you change those environments?

Newman: We have to go to something fundamental, to who we are as human beings. In some ways, the theater is of great help in this regard. The history of theater is one where you see people who have little in common come together and create theatrical performance together. They come to be exceedingly close and open to one another. Performance doesn’t change their cognitive view of the world, but it changes their capacity to hear even the most anti-social and divergent views of the world. It allows them to take a step further in the direction of transforming, if not the total world, at least some segment of it. There are iconic American stories of the good cop or the good social worker or the special teacher who does something like that. But, aside from recognizing them with an occasional award, what do we do with that? Why not study those people and take seriously what they do? In Operation Conversation and at the All Stars, we’ve tried to systemize something resembling that, with a theoretical understanding of how this could work.

Salit: When you were talking about meeting with the gang leaders, both taking that initiative and then what a posture would have to be in going to those meetings, how do you think about training people to be able to do those kinds of meetings? What do you have to teach people to be able to do what Fulani does with the cops and the kids, or do what a Chicago community organizer would have to do to sit in a room with gang leaders?

Newman: That impinges upon me to take another step in the direction of the cognitive.

Salit: Because?

Newman: Because the issue is not what we have to train them to do. It’s training them how to do it. And how to do something is a whole different epistemological, social, moral posture and attitude. How to do something is different than training people what to do. I don’t think it’s the “what” of it that makes a huge difference.

Salit: It’s the “how” of it.

Newman: Yes. If you want to look at that in a more complex matrix, you have to look at the totality of what Fulani stands for and how she got there. She’s not easily seen as a lightweight, by either the tough kids or by the cops. She has a history. She’s done something. When Al Sharpton and other black leaders were sitting inside someone’s house in Crown Heights during the riots, trying to figure out how to respond, Fulani was in the streets, literally standing in between the cops and the kids, telling each side not to attack the other. And they didn’t.

Salit: How do you teach people the “how?”

Newman: You have to change the total attitude of how the power institutions of our culture relate to the issues that they have to deal with. Otherwise, what will happen is the kids will get a few cookies, but there will be no back up. When the kids say, I need more than cookies, I need you to support me in being included in your institutions and the answer is Sorry. You’re just the experimental guinea pig. Take care of yourself now. We didn’t want to give you cookies in the first place.

Salit: Going back to your point earlier about Obama interrupting the traditional culture of international diplomacy. I’m thinking of one of the big “flash points” in the Democratic primary between Obama and Hillary Clinton when the issue on the table was whether they would meet with this set of world leaders. And Hillary said, “Not without conditions.” So what that was supposed to mean was that Obama was…

Newman: A softy.

Salit: …a softy, yes. That the idea that he would do it without conditions meant that he would be giving something away to the bad people, and that we can’t do that.

Newman: Well, if you’re not willing to give something to the bad people, then they don’t see you as a giver. At some level, they are asking for dollars and foreign aid of various kinds, of course. But it means something when they say they’re asking for respect. It means that you have to do something by way of accepting them as co-inhabitors of our planet, as fellow human beings, even if you think that they’re vile.

Salit: Going back to Chicago, they’re talking about intercepting young people who, based on the metrics, are on a path to violence. They’re designed to make them good kids rather than bad kids…

Newman: I wouldn’t agree with that, even.

Salit: You wouldn’t agree with what?

Newman: That they’re setting up a pathway to…

Salit: …make them good kids rather than bad kids.

Newman: They’re just kids. The language that they’re using invokes some kind of criteria, but it doesn’t come from anywhere, other than from inhuman gods. They’re just kids.

Salit: Yes. I know what you’re saying about the language. I’m suggesting that this is how those kids are seen.

Newman: And?

Salit: The entire orientation of the field is to want to turn kids into good kids rather than bad kids. That’s the plan, if you will.

Newman: And that’s the problem. Let’s both of us try harder at being empathic with the “bad kids.” We know something about being identified with the bad kids.

Salit: Yes, we do.

Newman: Do you think any effort to turn us into “good kids” is going to do anything but re-enforce our desire to do the things that we identify with being “bad”?

Salit: No.

Newman: So, that’s how these kids are. We don’t want to be turned into good kids. In school, the good kids were jokes. In life, good kids are taken advantage of. Whatever language they use, I understand it. You’re not going to change them in that way. Can we find a way of joining them and them joining us? That’s the serious question. We know who these kids are. We know where these neighborhoods are. Can we join forces with them? I think that’s what the All Stars is all about. Look, we’re as good as the day is long. We sit down and we talk with the local Ahmadinejads. We talk with those kids.

I think about Joel Press a lot these days, a major supporter of the All Stars who passed away suddenly of a heart attack. It was very tragic, a huge loss. In some ways, he was the inspiration for Cops and Kids. Joel was always advocating for the All Stars to reach the toughest kids, the bad kids. Now, the Cops and Kids program reaches kids who are tougher and more hardened than many of the kids in the All Stars. It’s interesting that the program that gets deepest into relating to those young people is the program which also brings in the cops. The transformation of these kids in All Stars and Cops and Kids is shockingly instantaneous, which is what these things are like. Reagan and Gorbachev, they sort of hit it off instantaneously. It didn’t take 70 years of negotiations.

Salit: Of laying down conditions.

Newman: Performatory connectedness, and I hate the big words, is just this kind of tactile, human capacity to bond. Human beings are very quick to violence. But, if there is anything that they are, roughly speaking, as quick to as violence, it’s love. Human beings fall in love at the drop of a hat. And that’s nice. I don’t subscribe to “all you need is love.” But, I think it is true that you can use those performatory passions much better than cognitive mental acts, which I’m very suspicious of in the sense that I don’t know if there’s an ontological reality that corresponds to them. I trust in human emotions. Not in the sense that I think that that’s all we have to do, but in the sense that there’s a language there that has not been thoroughly used.

That’s what All Stars is. That’s why I’ve been so adamant in my refusal to turn All Stars into either a quantitative “scale-up” or into something which is going to be substantiated by cognitively-determined tests. I think that misses the whole point of what All Stars is about. Look at the response to Cops and Kids by the NYPD. It’s been positive. The police are frustrated with the hostilities between themselves and the communities. With good reason. In some ways, you have to give credit to their frustration.

Salit: They see the limits of policing as an approach to these issues. They are out there on the front line.

Newman: Everybody thought for a long time in this country that youth violence was going to be fundamentally transformed by schools, elementary schools and high schools and universities. And I think it’s made a dent. I really do. But schools are much too bureaucratically structured, as well as everything else in this culture, to impact on the kids who are failing and left out.

Salit: Are you glad Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize?

Newman: Yes. Who else deserves it more for international peace? Despite the fact that he’s now conducting one of the largest wars going on in the world today. I think he has a real feel for peace. Who else has a feel for peace? I think it should have been you or Barack Obama. And I don’t think they were giving it to you.

Salit: I don’t think I was on the list.

Newman: You certainly weren’t on the short list.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, October 4, 2009 after watching selections from “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and “The Charlie Rose Show.”

Salit: We watched a Charlie Rose interview with Paul Volcker, chairman of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, about the state of the economy. Volcker says we need new revenue streams, but it’s too early to tackle the tax thing. Volcker says “we” should have been more alert to various weaknesses and vulnerabilities: credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, and so forth. Charlie Rose says ‘Well, people didn’t see these things.’ Volcker says ‘Well, actually, some people did see them, but no one wanted to act.’ Then, we read a piece in the New York Review of Books about economic development by William Easterly, professor of economics at NYU. The author’s angle was that when you get down to it, it’s not known how to promote growth. Growth is real. It occurs in different places and in different ways and economists try endlessly to analyze it and identify the factors that contribute to growth, but they don’t seem to be able to do that in any reliable or replicable way. So, Easterly suggests a number of methodological problems that account for not being able to pinpoint how growth occurs. I wanted to talk to you about some of the methodological problems that he identifies.

First, he explains that a survey of top economists showed they identified a total of 145 separate factors found to be associated with economic growth. But, when they were “field-tested,” these “patterns” – so-called – failed to hold up. So he raises the question, “how can there still be so many writers, [meaning economists] who claim to know how to promote growth?” He answers this question by paraphrasing a theme from the book “The Drunkard’s Walk,” claiming “Humans are suckers for finding patterns where none really exist, like seeing the shapes of lions and giraffes in the clouds.” So, tell me your thoughts about the quest for seeing patterns and identifying patterns in human life.

Newman: I don’t know if I’d say that people are suckers. People make the mistake of thinking that their capacity to, or their interest in, ordering things has anything to do with the things that they order, and so – even beyond the logical errors that are pointed to in these articles – is that logical error. The assumption is that because you can order things, it follows that there is an order that you’ve discovered in the ordering of things. But there isn’t. Ken Gergen and I wrote a paper for the American Psychological Association convention in 1995 about this very topic called “Diagnosis: The Human Cost of the Rage to Order.”*

Salit: Yes, of course.

Newman: And so things proceed on their merry way and when you come back next time, they have gone about doing or being what they are, which may or may not match the pattern you came up with. So, there is a more fundamental, not so much logical, though it’s related to logic, but ontological problem that human beings simply don’t want to deal with.

Salit: And that is?

Newman: Well, that the world isn’t the way in which they’ve ordered it.

Salit: OK, so to what do you attribute what you and Gergen called the Rage to Order, what Easterly and Leonard Mlodinow, the author of “The Drunkard’s Walk,” call finding patterns where none really exist? In the case of developmental economics, the economists are presumably looking for patterns because they want to be able to replicate the circumstances where growth occurs.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: That’s what they’re trying to discover.

Newman: And there’s only one consistently valid rule or if you will, law, to guide them on that matter.

Salit: And that is?

Newman: That growth occurs where growth occurs.

Salit: OK.

Newman: That doesn’t have very much predictive value.

Salit: No, it doesn’t.

Newman: But, that’s life.

Salit: OK, growth occurs where growth occurs.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: And that has little or no predictive value.

Newman: As far as I can see.

Salit: Maybe I’m making a huge leap here, but if you’re a developmental economist, or if you’re a government, or if you’re a world citizen and you’re concerned about the issue of poverty, for example, and you want to discover how to promote growth in the so-called Third World, how do you go about doing that? I guess there are two different issues here and maybe this goes to what you’re pointing to. There’s the question of what you do about that. And then there’s the question of whether you can create models to do something about that, and are those the same thing?

Newman: Well, we don’t know. The final section of the article you read to me by Easterly is about how an obscure Korean car shop owner did more to impact on the Korean economy than all the studies of Asian miracles put together.

Salit: Yes. He’s the guy who built Hyundai after many of his businesses failed.

Newman: So the message is, if you want to grow an economy, you’re better off being the guy who controls Hyundai, than you are being the academic who’s identifying the 75 factors that produce growth. We all know that Ju-Yung Chung is richer than all those academics put together.

Salit: No doubt.

Newman: So, let’s not make another logical error here. The point is not that there aren’t factors which produce growth – at the individual level, the emotional level, the international level, whatever. The point is that the models that we develop are no guarantee or even close to a guarantee. Or may not even be relevant to the growth. That’s the point.

Salit: So, why don’t we stop fooling ourselves?

Newman: Who knows? Because we have this rage to order and this rage to, therefore, glorify science and to want to think that things that aren’t science, like economics, really are. And so we persist in producing endless papers and institutes and studies – which may be useful – but they also may not be useful. But that’s a hard fact to accept, because human beings want to know that something is really useful. They want a sure bet at Las Vegas.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But, there are no sure bets at Las Vegas. The house doesn’t have to cheat to make money. They make money because of the human need to suppose that we know something that we can’t possibly know. Red Seven has got to win. How do you know? I called up 30 people and they all said play Red Seven. But it doesn’t come up. Baseball fans sit at home rooting madly for someone who’s supposed to get a hit, the assumption being that their rooting has something to do with whether he will or won’t get a hit.

Salit: So, you’re saying something more than, or other than, that models can be helpful but not determinative or predictive.

Newman: Well, with due respect, I’m not saying anything about determinative. You’re using traditional language. I’m trying to speak a simpler language. But, I guess you’re saying I’m not succeeding so you have to translate my language into a fancier language, which is halfway down the slippery slope into thinking you can make economics into a science, even if it isn’t. But you can’t.

Salit: I was using “fancy language” because I wanted to ask you what’s the activity that happens other than the model?

Newman: Well, it’s the activity that happens. That’s the activity that happens other than the model.

Salit: In Easterly’s article, he talks about growth being unstable. Growth is unstable, he says, and there’s no way to predict its patterns.

Newman: In whose eye is growth unstable? Does “unstable” mean the models, roughly speaking, that we put together are not coherent with what happens?

Salit: Well, it means that things happen that you have no way of predicting.

Newman: Well, how do you know that? I can tell you a way to predict them.

Salit: How?

Newman: Predict them.

Salit: But, if there’s no way of knowing that, then how can you predict them?

Newman: There are lots of things that people predict where they don’t have any way of knowing them. It’s what keeps people playing the horses at the track day after day after day.

Salit: OK.

Newman: And they spend hours going over the racing sheets and so forth. And then they look frustrated when the two-year-old kid took a crayon and picked nine winners. They’re like, Who is this kid?

Salit: He’s a prodigy.

Newman: And they insist, in an amusing way, that there’s an “order” that can be discerned. People assume that they can create something orderly and coherent based upon appropriate information and that means they will have a higher percentage of right answers than other people, and that will serve them better than people who have wrong answers.

Salit: Right.

Newman: And certainly, if you get that result, it does serve you better. But the fallacy that we make up as human beings, and this is the Rage part of the Rage to Order, is that this very process, even though it can work on some occasions, is sufficient to justify that the model is going to work all the time. And there’s no reason why it should. And it doesn’t. And interestingly, science, by which, roughly speaking, I mean physics, understands that. In some respects, it’s the basis, methodologically speaking, of much of contemporary physics.

Salit: The understanding of the unreliability of models.

Newman: The understanding of the undecidability of this whole process, including physics itself. A lot of pseudo-sciences, for all of their fancy language and mathematical formulas, are really what I would call Baconian in their essence, and I’m talking here about Francis Bacon, in that they are concocted more by human subjectivity than by anything which really turns out to be useful to anybody. That might be an unfair claim to make against Bacon, but nonetheless.

Salit: Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to defend him. But I do want to ask you about Easterly’s claim that “when you study the effect of a particular policy on growth, you also have to control for some of the other factors affecting it, for which there are practically endless possibilities.” I take it you would agree with that.

Newman: Well, I agree and I don’t agree, since you can’t. It’s well and good to say You also have to control for lots of other factors. But you can’t.

Salit: You can’t?

Newman: It’s too complex. You can fool yourself into thinking that you’ve taken into account the more important ones. And that might get you a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Salit: Right.

Newman: But you might have left out either one very important one or 75,463 unimportant ones that, taken together, make a difference.

Salit: So you can’t control for it.

Newman: That’s what I’m saying. He’s saying that you have to. I’m saying far from you have to, you can’t.

Salit: One of the reasons that he’s saying you have to, as I understand it, is that he’s trying to go up against what he calls the Confirmation Bias, which he sees as another methodological problem in economics. Confirmation Bias, roughly, is when you’re looking to prove something and you select your evidence, your models, accordingly. And, by the way, this may be the case in his article too, as he seems to be trying to prove that when push comes to shove, free market capitalism is a better formula for growth than other alternatives.

Newman: Might be.

Salit: Okay. Confirmation Bias. It sounds hifalutin. Fancy language, which you accused me of before. But basically it means you select the data that proves your point. I learned to do this in fifth grade.

Newman: Right.

Salit: It’s how you write an essay.

Newman: Right.

Salit: But, it’s one thing if you do that in fifth grade when you submit your paper to Mrs. Levy on “Causes of the War of 1812.” But it’s another thing if you’re running the world’s largest economy that affects the health and well-being of billions of people.

Newman: There’s no difference at all.

Salit: Well, that’s a little bit frightening, if the methodological primitiveness is the same. When you say there’s no difference between the essay you write in fifth grade on the causes of the War of 1812 and the fundamental methodological approach that economists use in coming up with the solution to the economic crisis, that’s not exactly good news.

Newman: Right, there’s no difference relative to the validity of the methodology. There is a difference in terms of the power the heads of government have to effect and transform policy, including making it seem as if what they’re saying is sensible or valid or so on. The fifth grader in Mrs. Levy’s class presumably doesn’t have that much control of things and so she or he is more subject to the authoritarian classroom rule of Mrs. Levy.

Salit: Actually, I liked Mrs. Levy.

Newman: Fine. But chances are your essay on the War of 1812 wasn’t going to serve as a template for U.S. policy in the War of 2012.

Salit: Certainly not! Unless we’re going to war with Britain.

Newman: Exactly.

Salit: Next up on Easterly’s checklist is The Law of Large Numbers and the Law of Small Numbers. Easterly says “This is a sarcastic reference to the Law of Large Numbers, in which you can have a high degree of confidence in the average value of a sample if the sample includes a very large number of observations. The Law of Small Numbers is when you stop way short of having ‘enough’ observations and show high confidence anyway.” So he gives an example from economic history. If you looked at the 1930s, he explains, the U.S. economy crumbled, while the Soviet economy grew. That led a whole school of economists to conclude Well, socialism or state-planned centralized economies grow at a faster rate than capitalist economies, which are vulnerable to these kinds of collapses, etc. So, that’s an example of a Law of Small Numbers, because it later turned out that the Soviet Union unraveled, in no small part because of the stagnation of its economic model, while capitalism rebounded. So, I guess the Law of Small Numbers is another way of saying there wasn’t enough data to make a judgment call.

Newman: It wasn’t a question of “enough.” I don’t think it’s even worthy of being considered a law, even a sarcastic one. These were just bad observations. Ordinary human beings recognize that you don’t serve the roast until it’s done. Otherwise, people won’t like it.

Salit: True.

Newman: It wasn’t a question of numbers. If you want to get relative certainty on predicting the time of someone’s death…

Salit: Yes?

Newman: Make the prediction roughly ten seconds before they die. And you’ll get it right every time. But of what value is it?

Salit: Virtually none.

Newman: There you go. But, you’ll be right. So, I don’t think it’s ultimately a question of numbers. I think it’s a question of which numbers. Underlying that kind of thinking is a qualitative analysis of the importance or relevancy of these numbers to the outcome you’re looking to predict. So, in some cases, one kind of thing can happen and it’s enough to make extraordinary predictions and maybe to make it with extraordinary success. In many cases, you can have a million numbers and they’re not particularly relevant. So, they make no difference. It’s not a quantitative issue so much as it is an issue of selection. And that’s a more qualitative indicator. There are all kinds of examples of this in the centuries of responses to David Hume’s “Theory of Constant Conjunction,” namely, that it’s an analysis of causality which shows that there’s a profound fallacy in that certain things can be constantly conjoined, virtually forever, and that doesn’t show that there’s a causal connection.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But whether they’re of value, whether it’s a million, ten or even one, it’s not about the numbers. That’s what the Bible tells us. After all, in western culture the Bible remains the most accepted book of understanding of how things got going. But there’s only one thing cited there.

Salit: One thing that got the Universe going?

Newman: It was God. There’s only one. There’s not even any effort to show that this happened 10 of 18 times. It happened exactly one time.

Salit: I see your point.

Newman: And, it’s still the most accepted notion in western culture.

Salit: That certainly is a Law of Small Numbers.

Newman: Right, you can’t get much smaller than that.

Salit: You certainly can’t.

Newman: No. And if you put forth alternatives to God having run the whole show, the response is That’s blasphemy. God is not only a small number. He’s the only allowable number.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Beyond that, there are also all kinds of known problems with probability, rationality, and utility. In fairness, I find myself having to be much more of a pragmatist than some of these people. Utility is filled with a similar set of problematic or contradictory features. So, does that have to lead you to existential despair?

Salit: It doesn’t have to lead you anywhere.

Newman: It could lead you to a recognition of the limited capacity for human beings to understand. Does that lead you to saying that we shouldn’t keep trying to understand? No. It doesn’t lead me there. Actually, I think there are some good arguments to show that it makes you more strongly committed to trying to understand. Since, in the understanding of this, we become clearer on the depth and degree of our ignorance, which depending on certain attitudinal issues makes you more or less eager to pursue knowing something. But I don’t think it necessarily means you give up in hopeless despair. In some ways, it doesn’t lead to anything that fits into a “rational picture” of this whole thing called living. But, I don’t think that it leads you into despair.

Salit: So in the Rage to Order, and this is going to be a broad oversimplification…

Newman: Ahhhh. The Rage to Simplify.

Salit: The Rage to Simplify, there you go. You and Gergen are talking about the drive to systematize an “understanding” of emotional problems.

Newman: Emotional disorders. So-called.

Salit: And, there is a connection between that, between the Rage to Order, and the shortcomings, or inability of psychology, as a field, to effectively treat mental illness and emotional pain.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: Would you say that the Rage to Order in economics is connected to the inability to end poverty?

Newman: Yeah, I’d be glad to say it, or affirm your saying it, whichever you like. I’m saying there’s an epistemological issue, a methodological and epistemological issue at the root of all this and it’s important to comprehend it or them, however many there are. Your question is a simple question with a complex answer and I don’t know if we have time to get into the details of that. But, yes I would.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.

* “Diagnosis: The Human Cost of the Rage to Order” later appeared as an essay in Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind, edited by Lois Holzman, published by Routledge, 1999.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, September 20, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and “The Charlie Rose Show.”

Salit: This week marks the one year anniversary of the collapse of the Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers. There are a lot of interests trying to sort out and spin what happened.

Newman: I think the policy down in Washington is “keep the people confused.”

Salit: Very much so. Let’s agree, in having our discussion, that we’re not economists, we’re not bankers, we’re not reporters who cover the financial sector, or anything like that. That said, the one-year anniversary of the failure of Lehman has become an official occasion to discuss the state of capitalism. The president went to Wall Street and proposed three things. He said that we need a new federal agency to which the banking and financial sectors will be accountable. We need legislative authority to intervene. And, we need a new regulatory matrix to make sure that the crisis of a year ago doesn’t repeat itself. So, let me run some of the current analyses by you and see how you react to them. First, there’s discussion about how Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Summers handled stabilizing the banking system. There was discussion of the institutions that are “too big to fail.” It is said that they deserve praise for what they’ve done but, these commentators observe, we should also note that the guys who brought us back from the brink are the same guys who brought us to the brink.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: How do you react to that observation?

Newman: We’ve only got a limited number of guys handling things at this level, so how could it be otherwise? Only a limited number of guys have access to playing in this game.

Salit: Right.

Newman: So, it’s virtually true by definition that the guys who got you out of it are the guys who got you into it. That’s who plays the game. But here’s my question. Does it make any sense to speak of simultaneously creating a very imposing regulatory system while at the same time adhering to a doctrine of “too big to fail?” How can you possibly put those two together?

Salit: That’s interesting because my first thought is that they absolutely go together.

Newman: How so?

Salit: Because that’s why you have a regulatory system. If the argument is that there are certain institutions that are too big to fail, you need a regulatory matrix that supports them doing what they need to do, but keeps them on this side of the brink.

Newman: Alright. But the motivation to become “too big to fail” is to make it so big that you can be assured that your bank, or brokerage, or insurance company won’t fail.

Salit: Yes, there’s an incentive there, surely.

Newman: If you’re “too big,” you can’t fail, on that doctrine. They won’t let you fail.

Salit: Because “too big to fail” means…

Newman: …the government will bail you out. So, if you’re too big to fail, then it seems to me that it’s reasonable for the people who are playing that game to infer that they should get as big as possible.

Salit: The bigger you are, the more protected you are if you get into trouble.

Newman: You can’t get into trouble, is the point. I’m saying that if certain institutions are simply “too big to fail,” then what does it mean to have regulations?

Salit: Maybe that’s connected to another theme in the discussions about Lehman. Pretty much everybody said that nothing much has changed in the year since the collapse.

Newman: They are connected. I’m raising what could have changed. I take there to be contradictory and competing basic principles. The greed of capitalism ultimately creates a kind of systemic contradiction and chaos which makes it impossible for capitalism to go on. I get that from Marx. It’s an insight that is validated in the course of events today. That’s what he identified, as I understand it, as capitalism containing the seeds of its own destruction. They’re not like real seeds that you’d buy at the…

Salit: …farmer’s market.

Newman: …Right. These are the seeds of its destruction.

Salit: So Keynes and Keynesianism is presumably the resolution of Marx’s well-articulated contradiction.

Newman: But the same people that said that Keynes had the resolution of that problem are saying that the problem hasn’t really been resolved.

Salit: True.

Newman: As in, “Everything is the same now as it was a year ago.”

Salit: Yes. So, we watched a Lehrer show interview with Nassim Taleb, who is a chaos theory guy and an economist. He was emphatic that what you have here is a situation where private debt is being converted to public debt, while the leverage levels are the same and the risk factor is worse than it was, ergo that nothing has changed. He is among those who issued warnings about pending collapse before it came to pass and he continues to make those same warnings. But there is another camp saying that what got established off of this whole episode is that government intervention is both necessary and effective. I’m saying that in response to your comment that Keynesianism doesn’t change the underlying problem.

Newman: But that’s what they’re saying.

Salit: Yes. The postmodern Keynesians – like Robert Reich or the economist from Princeton, Alan Blinder – are saying we should do whatever bailouts are needed, even if it creates problems – as in insurmountable debt – that we will have to deal with at some point.

Newman: This is the standard story – 1929 crash, deep Depression, endless regulations put in place. But now, in the last year or two or three or whatever, it turns out the regulations did nothing to halt what took place last September.

Salit: Of course, you’re right about that. And some argue that’s why we need a new regulatory matrix. That’s, in effect, what Obama is saying. The regulatory system failed to check the kinds of things – the greedy things – that are now going on in international finance capital.

Newman: Right.

Salit: And so, in effect, we need to update Keynes. The principle of government intervention remains sound. Unfettered markets are too unstable, volatile, and destructive. We need more suitable, more aggressive, forms of regulation.

Newman: You can say that. Then the conversation can continue by my saying: why is there reason to believe that a new kind of regulation will be more successful than the last set of regulations, which are constantly being circumvented, including by creating financial products that are virtually impossible to regulate? Evidence indicates that they will be successful in circumventing new regulations, since they already have been. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be talking about a collapse at all.

Salit: Correct.

Newman: So what reason is there to believe that such regulations will succeed, particularly when the process of regulating begins, so to speak with a model of having certain institutions that are “too big to fail”? If you operate off of that premise – which both Bush’s and Obama’s teams did – then it means that if you reach a certain level of “bigness,” you can do what you like because you have a guarantee that you won’t fail. How do those two go together?

Salit: That’s very tricky. I would say the best argument for how they go together is this: What Keynesianism means at this point in time is that the government, on behalf of the public interest, has to regulate or modulate the rate of growth and where growth occurs. In other words, that you have to introduce – and this is an updated version of an old debate – a level of economic planning, i.e., a form of socialism, not at the distribution level (because that’s not what they’re talking about), but at the level of wealth creation. One of the things that went wrong in this last cycle is that there were certain financial products (the subprime mortgage derivatives, etc.) that were so overleveraged, that they could unravel and, worse still, unravel the institutions that created them. So, some of the regulatory initiative will go in the direction of limiting the leverage, limiting the distance between debt and collateral, between paper economic growth and real economic growth. That’s the best answer to the question that you’re raising of how these things go together. The profit motive, the greed of American capitalism is a violently moving surge towards wealth creation and private ownership. Intervention and serious regulation presumably looks more and more like saying what kinds of wealth you can create and what kinds of wealth you can’t create. Or what’s going to be considered wealth and what’s not going to be considered wealth. It’s that genre of regulation. It can’t just be that you have to file a quarterly report with the SEC. It’s got to be more interventionist than that. Then you’re into the fight of how much Wall Street is going to accept at the regulatory level and how much of a political fight there’s going to be about that. I presume it’s going to be huge.

Newman: They don’t ask the rest of us how much leverage we’re going to accept.

Salit: No.

Newman: So that’s already a profound concession to Wall Street.

Salit: I would say so.

Newman: And that’s already several steps down the road to “too big to fail.” It was Wall Street that was too big to fail. It wasn’t Main Street that was too big to fail. The Fed didn’t put a limit on the number of people the banks – or any industry – could lay off. That’s not even being considered or discussed, meaning that bailouts would be conditional on maintaining current levels of employment, just as one example.

Salit: Systems that have been more interventionist and more socialistic, like in Western Europe, do have provisions for that. They have formulas that private companies have to follow relative to when profits are down, how certain workforce levels have to be maintained. There are protections for the workers that are built into the system. Those don’t exist here. There’s nothing like that at all. We have unemployment insurance.

Newman: That’s the opposite of what you’re talking about.

Salit: The exact opposite.

Newman: That’s insurance for those who are unemployed, not insurance against becoming unemployed.

Salit: Yes. Back to Nassim Taleb. He’s one of the people saying that nothing has changed – other than that the leverage equations are more risky today than they were when all of this started. Private debt converted to public debt. He said that the policy that’s being pursued by the Obama administration, which is this kind of post-Keynesian Keynesianism, is risky and immoral. Risky because of its potential for further and more dramatic collapse.

Newman: Risky because it won’t work, in the long run.

Salit: And immoral because it is placing an entire system, on which people’s lives are completely dependent, at risk.

Newman: It’s turning it over to our children because that’s who’s going to be around in the long run.

Salit: Yes, and they’ll inherit this risk-laden system that ultimately will collapse. Do you hear Taleb saying similar things as Marx? Do you hear him saying what we’re seeing here are “the seeds of its own destruction?”

Newman: At a minimum, I hear him saying there’s got to be a complete structural overhaul in order to prevent that. The whole system must be changed. I hear him, if not saying that, at least implying that. Look, the Keynesian notion of simply regulating a system that devours – and based on Marx’ and Rosa Luxemburg’s insights, must devour – everything around itself, including ultimately itself, well, how do you regulate that kind of monster? Why will that monster be regulated by anything? The monster that you’ve created has now come back to consume you. It’s like the dilemma of child-raising. If you raise a child who turns out to be a “monster” and then you say to that child, We’re going to put you under a set of regulations which are going to dictate what you can and can’t do. But the child is big enough and bully enough to say, I’ll do whatever the hell I want. How are you going to stop me? The person who created this monster child says Listen. There are some things that you can’t do. There are some absolute No’s. And the response is I’m bigger and I’m better at this game that you’ve constructed than you are. I’m your child. You made me. And you’re going to keep feeding me, no matter what I do.

Salit: “Too big to fail” might mean “Too big to regulate.”

Newman: You see, regulation of the kind that’s under discussion, is empty. All they’re really saying is, after the fact we’ll figure out what we should have done or could have done. But how does that help you to regulate? It doesn’t. And the monster says, Your regulations are just my next meal. That’s true almost by definition Because, says the monster to the regulators, you need me or else the system you want to keep intact will fall apart. So, I’ll just keep doing this because you’re always going to save me. If I understand anything resembling rational logic and if I understand what the economists and analysts are saying, it’s that the system both has been saved and hasn’t been saved. So, where are we? That’s roughly where we were when this whole thing started.

Salit: How big a throw down do you think Obama is ready to have with Wall Street?

Newman: What’s he throwing down? You can call it a throw down, but if you look more carefully, you might discover that it’s just a wink and a nod.

Salit: I presume he’s going to put some kinds of regulatory proposals on the table in Congress that different elements on Wall Street aren’t going to like, for one reason or another. And there’ll be a fight about that and some kind of compromise will get worked out. Congress will get a modicum more control over…

Newman: …over fundamentally uncontrollable behavior. Look, the gorilla cage at the Central Park zoo wouldn’t contain King Kong.

Salit: You bet. You’d have to build a superhuman cage to control him.

Newman: And the system that they’re looking to regulate not only permits uncontrollable behavior…

Salit: …it is based on that.

Newman: Yes. It encourages that. It works off of that.

Salit: The CEOs, the financial journalists, etc. will pretty much acknowledge that the business of international finance capitalism has become, in so many ways, incomprehensible. The former CEO of Paine Webber, Donald Marron, who now runs a hedge fund, described a situation where the major banks didn’t even understand the nature of their own businesses. There were divisions and products that were so offline as to be immeasurable.

Newman: To analyze what you’re saying, I’d have to analyze your tone of voice. You said, ‘They didn’t even understand.’ You say something like that in the tone of voice you’re saying it and the message I get from what you’re saying is Could you believe it? Even they didn’t know what was going on. Knowing what’s going on is not automatically a benefit. As a matter of fact, we live more and more in a “need to know” world.

Salit: You need to know the things that you need to know…

Newman: …and you don’t need to know what you don’t need to know…

Salit: …to get through the next day.

Newman: The best Wall Street players are smart enough to have realized this. They’re well into playing this new game. There’s so much expertise, but a narrow expertise. Different people know this and different people know that. And they’ve learned well to adapt to and make good use of a system which includes that epistemic reality, if you will, to further advance their bottom line.

Salit: They certainly have.

Newman: In the old days – what we now call “the day” – we would have said It’s the best of rational thinkers trying to solve the problems of a fundamentally irrational system. Well, today the better you are at being rational, the less capable you are of solving the problems of irrationality. What’s next? Beats us.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, September 13, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and “The Charlie Rose Show.”

Salit: I want to ask you about what Mike Barnacle called his “crackpot theory” while interviewing Pat Buchanan and David Corn. His crackpot theory is that whenever you’re talking about significant structural change – like on the scale of what is being considered for health care – there’s an automatic resistance. There are particulars about the health care controversy, there are particulars about the role of government and the controversies over that. But, in some sense, Barnacle says a lot of what the angst is about here is just simply the reaction to structural change. Is that a crackpot theory?

Newman: I’d say “yes” because what we’re talking about are cracked pots.

Salit: As in, the health care system.

Newman: And, in general.

Salit: Obama gave his talk on health care. What did you think of the talk?

Newman: I thought it was an effective talk, a good talk.

Salit: What about it did you think was effective?

Newman: I think he argued that this health care bill is ultimately an extension of Medicare and Medicaid, and a way for the government to provide – through a mixed model – decent health care to all Americans. He argued that it doesn’t represent a structural change. That we’re not talking socialism. We’re talking social responsiveness on the part of the government. I think he made that case. We’ll see what happens.

Salit: We watched a discussion that Charlie Rose put together after Obama gave his talk. It included Joe Califano, President Lyndon Johnson’s senior domestic policy aide in the fight for Medicare, probably the biggest overhaul of the health care system in the history of the country. In this conversation, Califano, Al Hunt and others said now it’s time, excuse my French, to bust some balls. The proposals are out there. There’s been a debate. There’s been fur flying from the left and from the right. But now it’s time for Obama to play hardball with members of Congress. The American people have reacted how they’ve reacted. There’s some sense of what is going to be acceptable and what isn’t going to be acceptable. Now it’s time to bear down on Congress and line up the votes. Is there anything in the picture that says don’t do that, you can’t do that, or that Obama’s going to pay a terrible price for doing it?

Newman: No. If it’s passed, it’ll be forgotten in an hour and a half.

Salit: It’ll be forgotten in an hour and a half?

Newman: In other words, people will learn to live with it. All that’s going on now is an effort by the right wing to pick up substantial political gains.

Salit: And how are they doing, do you think?

Newman: We’ll find out when they take the vote in Congress.

Salit: But it’s not just about the vote in Congress. The country comes out of this with an expanded health care program. Obama comes out of this with a “victory” on delivering health care. But the Republicans also come out of this in a better political position than they’ve been in basically since Obama won the presidency.

Newman: Well, that’s not a very long time ago.

Salit: True enough.

Newman: Is there a question here?

Salit: Look, there are different ways to characterize the status of this fight. On the one hand, this is a typical example of the ongoing competition between the Democrats and the Republicans, between the liberals and the conservatives. There’s a deal being cut. Meanwhile, this one’s grandstanding, this one is apologizing, that one is not apologizing, and all of that. Still, there’s a demand for change on the part of the American people, a demand for remodeling our country, remodeling our politics, remodeling our political culture. Where is that in this situation?

Newman: Where is that? It’s part of what’s going on. People want change in the political process. But even after they’ve expressed that – for example, by voting for Obama – when the legislative process cranks up, it still looks the same. We haven’t found a way to change that yet, other than to build an independent movement that can exercise power.

Salit: We watched a discussion of the Supreme Court arguments this week about campaign finance regulation. The matter before the court, which the justices called a special session to review, has to do with whether to lift the ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns. The traditional liberal/progressive/reform view on campaign finance has been that you’ve got to control the flow of money, you’ve got to control the source of money flowing into the election system in order to guard against either corruption or the appearance of corruption. Interestingly, the courts don’t make that much of a distinction between corruption and the appearance of corruption.

Newman: There isn’t much of a distinction.

Salit: Why do you say that?

Newman: Because I think the country is so corrupt that any distinction between those two is almost indiscernible.

Salit: OK. So, the traditional liberal/reform view is that this is the bottom line for maintaining or refueling a healthy democracy, this is ground zero for the good government movement. There are different ways the Court could go. The Court could construct, as was discussed, a narrow ruling that makes a decision relative to this particular situation regarding a film about Hillary Clinton that was produced and distributed during the presidential election. Or the Court could make a broader decision and strike down the ban on corporate funding. How big a deal is this case, do you think?

Newman: That’s a little hard to answer. The cynical, though probably accurate, answer to that question is that no matter what the Supreme Court decides, all the players involved will find a way to game the system. So, I want to say that it’s not going to make that big a difference. On the other hand, as we know from participating in this process, it can make something of a difference. Our general posture has been to reject the left/liberal position on campaign finance and take a more libertarian position.

Salit: And that comes from being outsiders to the political process. Campaign finance reform and public financing have, in most cases, ended up privileging the insiders. As independents, we want as much money as possible available to the outsiders.

Newman: That’s a pragmatic position that we’ve taken, rather than holding to the traditional liberal view of “let’s just stop the corporations from having too much control.” And I think our position is correct, relative to our circumstances. I don’t know what the Court will do, though I think, as usual, the Court will do as little as possible. That’s what they do, in most cases. Periodically, they make a stand. I don’t know if they’re prepared to make a gigantic stand on this one.

Salit: It’s the doctrine of “constitutional avoidance.” It even has a name. Some of us call it “ducking.”

Newman: Some of us call it “conservatism,” meaning that if you don’t do anything, the rich will continue to hold sway.

Salit: I thought the exchange between Justice Breyer, a liberal, and Ted Olson, an attorney for the plaintiffs (who are political conservatives) was interesting. Breyer asked Olson whether it would be the case that if the Court were to strike down the existing precedent and rule in the plaintiff’s favor, that corporations and unions could give unlimited amounts of money to the political process, but that political parties could not. This would be true because political parties are specifically limited in their fundraising and campaign spending. Breyer was, in effect, defending what we consider to be the privileged position of parties because he warned that actors other than political parties would have more capacity to impact on the political process than political parties themselves.

Newman: Well, I agree with your point. However, I’d add that Breyer’s argument depends on there being a meaningful distinction between political parties and the supporters or endorsers of political parties.

Salit: As in the corporations and the unions.

Newman: Yes. But there is no such distinction. When ordinary Americans see that some major corporation – like General Electric – is giving ten million dollars to a candidate, most people will say, Oh, he’s a Republican. And they’d be right.

Salit: And if you’re Local 1199 and you’re giving a half a million dollars to Bill Thompson…

Newman: Most people say Oh, he’s a Democrat. There’s no distinction. What Robert Reich once said of corporations is likewise true of political parties. Most of the people on corporate boards are lawyers figuring out how to get around whatever regulations they come up with in Washington. And the same is true for the parties. No matter how the Supreme Court rules.

Salit: Thanks, Fred

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, September 6, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” and “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Salit: I already have a working title for this week’s Talk/Talk.

Newman: Which is?

Salit: “Obama’s Entanglements.” No doubt it’s something of a redundancy, because being President of the United States is all about entanglements. But the two in particular that we’ll talk about today are Afghanistan and the fight over health care.

Newman: I have an alternative title.

Salit: What is it?

Newman: My title is “So What if He is a Socialist?”

Salit: Well, that might be on point right now. We’ll start with what’s going on in Afghanistan, where we’re looking at escalating U.S. involvement. We’ve got 68,000 troops there and the talk is about deploying more. And, we just watched New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins live from Kabul and the situation looks very bad, very unstable. It’s a country at war, that situation doesn’t seem to be improving and any sense of popular political confidence in the central government, Karzai’s government, is eroding.

Newman: And it wasn’t much to start with.

Salit: No, it wasn’t much to start with. Some people think we can make a difference there. Obviously, I’m not a military expert or an expert on Afghanistan, by any stretch of the imagination. But given the political instability and the failure of the central government, including the massive election fraud that is surfacing, I just don’t see how you stabilize the situation militarily and hold it without an ongoing American presence there. I just don’t see it.

Newman: It does look like one of those situations where the reaction to what’s going on is to dislike the Americans. And that’s not a good situation for us. That’s lose/lose.

Salit: If you’re an Afghani who is at all sympathetic to the Taliban you oppose the U.S. for fighting them. If your family or village was part of the collateral damage from U.S. airstrikes, you hate the U.S. If you want some kind of more secular government, you might have supported Karzai, but the Karzai government – backed by the U.S. – is being exposed as thoroughly inept and corrupt. That doesn’t exactly make you like the Americans either.

Newman: I think I’m saying the same thing you’re saying and I agree with you. But, I don’t think the question really turns on the Taliban.

Salit: OK.

Newman: The problem is there’s no responsible force to relate to. There’s nobody else there that has any organic strength that we can relate to. In the absence of that, what is it that we’re trying to do? I understand the long-term purpose of deterring the terrorists. But, I don’t know how this accomplishes that.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: I know that this is the good war as opposed to the bad war in Iraq. I don’t doubt that Obama was opposed to the war in Iraq. He said so and he acted on that before he was president and since being elected president. But, in many respects, I don’t see how the Afghan situation differs all that dramatically from Iraq, in terms of the potential upside for the U.S. In Iraq, there was Saddam Hussein, who we could take some degree of credit for getting rid of. But I don’t know there is any such figure in Afghanistan.

Salit: Well, there is a whole social order and infrastructure in Iraq. Partly as a function of Hussein, authoritarian though he was, and partly as a function of the history of Iraqi/Persian culture. When American troops leave Iraq, there’s something resembling a nation there. As Dexter Filkins said in the piece we watched, Afghanistan is a country that is living in the 4th Century.

Newman: Well, I don’t want to knock the 4th Century, so we better be cautious about that line of criticism. I mean, relative to the 21st, it might have a lot going for it.

Salit: OK.

Newman: I don’t want to glorify the 4th Century, either. But, whatever century it is, the power dynamic doesn’t support this strategy. It’s sad. I’m not a military expert, so maybe you can put in so many troops that you can simply overwhelm the situation. But I don’t know what happens next. To whom do you turn to take over? I think it’s a mistake, frankly, on Obama’s part, a carryover mistake. He carried over some of Bush’s key military advisors and he carried over some of the mistaken premises that come with them. My guess is that the military is playing a much too influential role in all of this. They’re looking to pull something of a victory out of the whole Iraq/Afghanistan situation, but I don’t think there’s a victory to be pulled out of it, frankly. It’s sad and insofar as I’m entitled to have an opinion as an American citizen, that’s what it is. I think we shouldn’t be there.

Salit: The health care debate.

Newman: It seems to bear a certain resemblance to the Afghan situation.

Salit: It does. Certainly, in terms of the domestic politics surrounding the policymaking, they seem very similar. But here’s the thing. Chris Matthews has this story. The Democratic Party left is up in arms about the idea that the “public option” component of the health care package might be sacrificed and they’re putting a lot of heat on Obama about this. And by the way, in this scenario, Matthews defines the left as David Corn from Mother Jones and The Nation crowd, the “Netroots,” and so on, but he also includes Nancy Pelosi, who is taking this position.

Newman: Well, that’s where the problem lies.

Salit: Say more.

Newman: I’m not a super big fan of David Corn, but I’m more inclined towards his understanding of what the left is, than Nancy Pelosi’s.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But, if that combination is what Obama is holding on to, he’s automatically in trouble because that’s an unstable combination.

Salit: A hardcore Democratic Party leader…

Newman: …and operative…

Salit: …like Pelosi, combined with a non-governmental leftist like Corn?

Newman: Yes, Pelosi and Corn, who I’d call a relatively independent leftist. That’s an unstable coalition, it seems to me. So, what does Obama have to hold on to there? Not a whole lot. And that’s been his problem from the get-go. He’s trying to pass what I take to be genuinely progressive, well-intentioned health care reform legislation. But his organizational support comes from the Democratic Party, which cares more for its own political interests than for progressive health care reform.

Salit: Meaning, it’s not just about “getting this done.” It’s about whether hardcore Democratic Party insiders can share power with the left.

Newman: That is the shaky foundation of his political situation. And if he’s done in, that’s what will have done him in. That contradiction.

Salit: How?

Newman: Because in the process of trying to bring Nancy Pelosi and the more independent left together, he is creating openings for the Republicans to come back. And they are.

Salit: Here are some things that I find confusing. You have The Nation, Mother Jones, progressives in the Democratic Party, Nancy Pelosi and the hardcore labor types – other than Hoffa – all saying there’s got to be a public option. And they’re hammering Obama on this. So Bill Clinton gives this talk and says, essentially, ‘Don’t forget that the criteria for what we do here has to be what’s good for health care, what’s good for the economy AND (here he points his finger), what’s good for the Democratic Party.’ Essentially, he’s saying to the left, ‘Don’t blow this deal. We’re on our way to a deal. Obama’s on his way to a deal. Don’t blow it.’ And, that’s how this thing is being framed. Matthews says Bill Clinton is God. Literally. And God’s question is, ‘Is the left going to blow the deal for Obama?’

Newman: Yes, that’s how Chris Matthews and Bill Clinton are framing it. But, as Corn commented to Matthews on the air, ‘I remember the days when you didn’t think Clinton was God.’

Salit: A notable comment. So, from Obama’s point of view, he wants to bring the left along. He doesn’t want to lose the left on this and he also wants to get a bill passed.

Newman: Obama must have been counting on the left maintaining its sway.

Salit: Over itself? To keep itself united?

Newman: No. Over the independent movement. And, that’s what hasn’t held. And the reason it hasn’t held is that the left hasn’t really been a long-term partner in the process of taking the independent movement to the left.

Salit: That’s an understatement.

Newman: This doesn’t grow out of nowhere. The left has not played that role and has not been able to secure that.

Salit: We’ve played that role. CUIP has played that role.

Newman: And played it well enough to get Obama elected. We have enough strength, given the fractious quality of the American left – particularly relative to the tactic of securing the independent movement – to have played that role. But holding that relationship? That’s another story.

Salit: I wrote a letter to David Brooks after the New York Times published his column “The Obama Slide” in which I criticized the automatic equation he makes between independents and the political center. He said Obama’s appeal to the left for support for health care reform has cost him support with independents. I wrote him that he was misinterpreting the polls. That when they look at the health care debate, one of the things that independents see is partisan politics as usual. They see Obama bogged down in that. And that’s a big part of what they’re responding to. Independents are conflicted about the role of government, that we know. But they don’t like the partisanship coming from all sides. And they’re afraid that the product to come out of such a process will be too partisan, too driven by special interests.

Newman: But the deeper issue is that independents are not led. Yes, everybody has conflicts about government. But the independent movement is not yet securely led by either the left of center or by the right.

Salit: Correct.

Newman: That’s part of what it means to be independent. And also to be so early in the process of emerging as a new political force. They’re susceptible to being all over the place.

Salit: And we’re not strong enough to do that.

Newman: Yes. And the left has not appreciated the significance of a coordinated and coherent struggle to influence the independent movement. And so, independents are vulnerable. To whom? Well, to the right. Why has the right been getting so much attention in this debate? Because if nothing else, they’re politically unified. And, they’ve had decades of being unified. They’ve always believed in cultivating their influence in the independent movement. Look at Pat Buchanan, who tried a full scale social conservative takeover of the independent movement. He failed – independents rejected him. But that doesn’t mean the GOP doesn’t work to control the independents. And as soon as they got their next chance, they grabbed it.

Salit: That’s one reason the indies’ support for Obama was so extraordinary. It took 20 years to get there. But the left never supported us in doing that.

Newman: Well, we’ve been the whipping boys of the left on this very issue. And that has justified its not taking a more serious and coherent role relative to independents. They abstained on the grounds that we were there. So we know something about this relational situation.

Salit: That’s accurate.

Newman: What will Obama do about all of this? Who knows? Obviously, his strongest pull is to try to follow Bill Clinton and make the Democratic Party play.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: That’s what Matthews and others are saying is the way to go. And, it might well be. Under the circumstances I’m describing, there might not be any other play.

Salit: No.

Newman: If it comes down to choosing us vs. the Democratic Party, who do you think he’s going to choose?

Salit: The Democratic Party.

Newman: But, as I suggested in my headline, what if he is a socialist? That could be his biggest problem.

Salit: Meaning?

Newman: One way he could play this is to be the person who unifies the left. But what does that do to his relationship to the Democratic Party? He might unify the left and wind up coming in last in the next presidential election. I’d say that’s a dilemma.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: You imply this in your letter to David Brooks. But you might want to send a follow up.

Salit: OK.

Newman: You have to tell Brooks that he doesn’t understand the dynamics of the independent movement. It’s the story you tell in your documentary, “How the Independent Movement Went Left by Going Right.” You are the voice of the progressive elements of the independent movement, which is an important voice, and you have to speak the truth of what’s going on in the independent movement, relative to these other dynamics, so that independents and others can have a deeper appreciation of what’s really going on.

Salit: The independent movement went left, under the influence of progressive independents, but now the right is trying to take it back. And the broader left is too preoccupied with its position within the Democratic Party to join with us in influencing the independents.

Newman: Yes. Look, the big issue which underlies this whole health care polarization is where do you stand on socialism, American-style. Obama seems surprised that this issue has emerged once again. But, he shouldn’t be. I think Obama made a mistake in thinking that his eloquence, which is substantial, and his popularity, which is substantial, was enough to get this through without that becoming an issue.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But, it had to become the issue. It’s always been the issue in the political history of health reform in this country. Health care reform stands for, insofar as anything does, a shift towards socialism, because it is. I have no objections to that. Lots of Americans do.

Salit: There is a new book out about the history of health care reform which chronicles how Franklin Roosevelt, who arguably had the most solid reform coalition behind him to enact sweeping changes in the structure and design of the American government, didn’t undertake health care reform because the right was so virulent in its message that this was nothing short of socialism. In 1930s America, FDR couldn’t make that work for the New Deal coalition.

Newman: Well, he had a world war on his hands and he needed the Soviet Union as one of his allies. So, it was a trade off. He had to be very cool in terms of how much socialism he could bring to America.

Salit: Yes. Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, August 23, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and several Charlie Rose interviews.

Salit: Here’s something I was thinking about while we were watching several interviews. Freeman Dyson, the noted physicist, protested to Charlie Rose about the media, in this case the New York Times. Dyson talked about a colleague of his, a fellow physicist. They have divergent views on global warming, apparently, but they’re also good friends. The New York Times wrote an article about them that painted them as mortal enemies. New York Governor David Paterson made a number of remarks this week about how the media is painting him as a failure even though he’s having certain successes, and the story of his successes aren’t coming through. And we watched a Chris Matthews segment where he talked about the impact of these town hall meetings around health care and the process in Congress. Chris was very worked up about the whole thing. He made the point that you have to be careful about how you respond because television is selective, meaning that the tabloid news, cable news, whatever you want to call it, can focus on a single incident that occurs at one meeting in Scranton, and film it, and put it on television, and it becomes “what’s happening,” a total reality. Now, these are all very different situations obviously, but they got me thinking about “Truth,” about an environment in which – here’s one way to describe it – it’s so hard to tell what’s going on. We read an interview that Charlie Rose did with economist Robert Shiller, where Shiller refutes the idea that what drives the economy is markets. He argues that what really drives the economy, if you will, is human subjectivity. He calls it the “animal spirits,” how people feel about the state of things, about a set of investments, that the issue is confidence and whether you can quantify that. Anyway, Fred, I was thinking about each of these situations and I think of them as connected to issues that you’ve been working on for a lifetime, what you call “The End of Knowing,” the impact of knowing, the impact of not knowing…

Newman: Even the end of the impact of knowing.

Salit: I’m tempted to say, what a crazy time to be alive, meaning that the world is a very crazy place. Now, you might say What do you mean by crazy?

Newman: I wouldn’t say that.

Salit: There’s a certain kind of craziness that comes from not knowing what’s going on or it being impossible to know what’s going on. I’m wondering if this picture that I’m painting holds together for you.

Newman: Well, one thought is it’s a time when we need to have a rational understanding of irrationality or an irrational understanding of rationality.

Salit: I’ll buy that.

Newman: Or, alternatively, what I’ve tried to write about is that we have paradigms for everything, but we don’t have a paradigm for what a paradigm is. So, we are very informed but we know nothing. Which is not necessarily bad. Maybe we’re undoing the Enlightenment.

Salit: We’re undoing the Enlightenment. In what sense do you mean?

Newman: Well, we’re not so much enlightened as we are believers that we are enlightened.

Salit: Uh huh.

Newman: It makes me think of the work of the psychologist Leon Festinger who was at Stanford, where I went to graduate school.

Salit: What was his work?

Newman: Something he called cognitive dissonance. Among other things, Festinger studied small groups, who are now called cults – I don’t think he called them cults – small groups of people living in the hills of northern California near the Pacific Ocean, who all had cataclysmic views of the end of the world.

Salit: The End is Coming.

Newman: Yes. I don’t know how his studies were carried out or exactly what they did, behaviorally speaking. But, the core finding was that when the date that the group had set for the end of the world didn’t happen, remarkably, they quickly went back to doing everything they had done before that time had come and passed. But, even if they went right back to doing what they were doing, it had to have had an effect on them. The world, in general, might be living under those circumstances.

Salit: The circumstances being that a set of things that one believed in and organized one’s life around don’t come to pass, but you still go on?

Newman: The circumstances being not just any old circumstances, though. The ending of the world.

Salit: But, generally speaking, people don’t think the world is ending.

Newman: That’s not clear.

Salit: Say more.

Newman: Part of the message of the radical Muslims is an end of the world position. It might be the word of a handful of people. But millions of Muslims believe that.

Salit: True.

Newman: The 60-year movement to control nuclear armaments is based on end of the world thinking, namely that if we don’t put controls on this, we’re going to blow the world up.

Salit: Action movies based on end of the world scenarios that are narrowly averted are very popular.

Newman: I think there is a more and more pervasive environment of “end of-ism.” “This is the end of capitalism as we know it,” that’s been the mantra. And yet we go to sleep and tomorrow comes.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: Where is it? Where is the end-of? Well, on the one hand, you wouldn’t know about it. If it happens, you wouldn’t be here.

Salit: Right, you would have been ended.

Newman: But maybe all endings are not bad. In a way, that’s what Dyson was saying about global warming.

Salit: He says the world has been getting warmer for 12,000 years.

Newman: Yes. And he visited Greenland, which is kind of ground zero for global warming. And the people there told him they were glad it was getting warmer!

Salit: Yes, and meanwhile the environmental movement is Oh my god, the world is getting warmer!

Newman: Yes, but in Greenland they’re saying, Haven’t we been cold long enough?

Salit: Well, Dyson says the planet is getting warmer, but it’s not clear that that’s a function of what human beings are doing. He said it’s not clear scientifically how much that’s contributing. He’s saying the world is getting warmer and that’s also a good thing.

Newman: It could be.

Salit: It could be a good thing.

Newman: My feeling is that it could be a good thing but more than that, it could be that it’s just the thing that’s happening – neither good nor bad. It’s just the planet going through continuous changes. It began as molten lava and cooled down for a while – as in billions of years – and what we’re picking up on now is just another stage in the long continuous history of the earth.

Salit: You could say this is simply a scientific debate like many other scientific debates that have come before and will come later and that’s what it is. But it does seem – and maybe this is what Dyson’s arguing against – it does seem to have a kind of cataclysmic or end of the world hysteria to it.

Newman: Exactly. Maybe that’s what’s leading science astray.

Salit: How so?

Newman: Because science is typically quite levelheaded about these matters.

Salit: Right.

Newman: But if what’s dominating international culture, what’s beginning to dominate it is this kind of end-ism, then maybe that’s impacting on science.

Salit: On levelheaded, truth-based, entirely objective, science.

Newman: There you go.

Salit: Do you think science has gone astray?

Newman: I don’t know if it’s gone astray. But I think science is as much a part of the culture as anything, so it’s influenced by other factors from the culture, it seems to me. As opposed to how it likes to think of itself – as above and beyond culture.

Salit: Yes, it does like to think of itself that way. I guess that’s the scientific definition of truth, that there is an objectivity which transcends environment, culture, etc.

Newman: Yes, but that rests on what I take to be a contradiction, meaning that in order to have any understanding of that, according to scientific criteria, you have to be able to view two things: the object directly and its transformation.

Salit: Right.

Newman: But there aren’t two things. There’s one thing. It’s it/us. Or as Plato put it and Donald Davidson preached, I think quite informatively, in order to see whether or not one thing is an image of another thing, you’d have to have still a third thing. “A” is like “B” and “B” is like “C,” but you can’t directly compare “A” and “C.”

Salit: Which means?

Newman: You have to have a third thing. But to show that “B” is like “C” you’d have to have something – “D” – which “B” is like and “C” is like. And this leads to an infinite regress.

Salit: Got it.

Newman: We don’t have all those things. What we seem to have is one thing.

Salit: A totality.

Newman: Not “A” totality, because that reifies totality. But it is a totality.

Salit: I was having a conversation with a friend earlier this week about social change and performance.

Newman: Yes?

Salit: And about the question “Can performance change the world?” We were talking about Lenora Fulani’s program, Operation Conversation: Cops and Kids and the use of performance in these programs. Police officers in uniform and young people from the poor communities get together in these workshops and they do theater exercises together. Then they do an improvisational performance together and then they have a conversation about what goes on between them in the streets. Part of what you see in the workshop is that their conversations and ability to talk to each other and relate to one another is changed by what they’ve done together, more specifically by their performance together. So, this led to a discussion about what happens when they leave the workshop. Can the claim be made that change occurs in the room and that this change is lasting?

Newman: It doesn’t have to be lasting. If there’s a change, there’s a change.

Salit: OK, so this gets to the question I wanted to ask you. My friend would agree with you. She said, ‘If change happens in the room, change has happened.’ And she referred to certain laws of physics that say when two particles – I hope I’m using the right terms here – when two particles meet, collide, whatever, then separate, they’re still intertwined because the fact that they met and interacted never goes away.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: That’s a part of who they are forever.

Newman: At least for a long time.

Salit: For a long time. OK. So, her suggestion was that what happens with the cops and kids is analogous to the particles, that the laws of physics apply here because these things that happen are always a part of what happened.

Newman: I’d say it’s not a law of physics. It’s a law of history. As I say to people in my therapy groups when they sometimes say, Well, this is a very positive experience, but what does it mean outside of the room? And, I ask them, Well, where is it going to go?

Salit: Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, August 16, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” and several Charlie Rose interviews.

Salit: Here’s what was offered on Charlie Rose as a metaphor for the two sides of the American personality by Kurt Andersen, author of a new book called “Reset”: The ant stores food during spring and summer so that when the weather turns cold, the ant has something to eat and the grasshopper is an irresponsible partygoer who does nothing to protect himself for the future and then…

Newman: The grasshopper doesn’t have to. He eats the ant.

Salit: Aha! The untold part of Aesop’s story!

Newman: There you go.

Salit: I see. Basically, this was a cover up by Aesop because he doesn’t reveal how the grasshopper survives. I was going to ask you, assuming (perhaps foolishly) a continuum from Aesop to Andersen, whether you thought the fable captures something about the American psyche, the so-called two sides of the American personality.

Newman: Sure it captures something. Everything captures something. But I don’t think the issue is the American personality.

Salit: OK.

Newman: The issue is the character and nature of history and Andersen doesn’t understand it. You can tell that from his “reset” metaphor.

Salit: Say more.

Newman: You can’t reset history. History happens. And it remains permanently present in what comes next. You can’t make all of that go away by a “reset,” by starting all over again. It sounds nice. It’s a nice civil kind of conservatism to suggest that we can just go back to the good old days and start all over again.

Salit: The first principles of our country, as he says.

Newman: But you can’t. You can’t go back to the good old days. You have to deal with the days that are here and that includes the complex history that we’ve been through to get here. So the issue is what we move on to and how we most effectively move on to it. That’s illustrated, in my opinion, by the intensity of the debate around health care. This is an oversimplification, but nonetheless I’ve always felt that the long term debate over health care is the societal form of the “socialism or capitalism” debate. That’s what it’s meant. That’s writ large in the current circumstance and Obama is bearing the brunt of that debate right now, while trying to lead the way forward, without using the language of socialism, and almost certainly overworking the language of capitalism. That’s what the raw emotions are about. The right wing is aghast, not by how much money we’re spending. I think that’s ludicrous. Nobody worries about how much money we’re spending, as long as it’s not their money.

Salit: Right.

Newman: The tax rate is not going to go up dramatically. It can’t. It’s so high already. How much could it go up? No, the most right wing voices are saying in their appeal to a base: We don’t want to have any or more or all of our money spent on poor people. It’s not more complicated than that.

Salit: You know, there’s never any outcry from the right about the idea that government spends a fortune of money on the Pentagon and the defense budget and no one says Get the government out of my self-defense! I’m not trying to make the classical argument that we shouldn’t spend money on war, we should spend money on peace, the old “guns or butter” argument. But the argument that you can’t trust the government to run anything for us, which is part of the argument put forth against health care, is not an argument that people really believe.

Newman: The government runs virtually everything.

Salit: Exactly, including the defense and national security of our country. We spend billions of dollars to defend the homeland and no one says that everybody should just figure out how to defend themselves against terrorists on their own.

Newman: But things much closer to home are run by the government. The government decides whether we can drive a car or not.

Salit: Or sell liquor or give someone a manicure.

Newman: There’s enormous government involvement. The controversy is fundamentally about what our values are. But no one’s allowed to talk about that. You’ve got to talk about concrete, practical things.

Salit: Andersen says you don’t have to have a debate about socialism vs. capitalism. It’s not about that. It’s about pragmatism. Americans are pragmatists and the positives coming out of the current crisis include that pragmatism is more acceptable now, that it’s not about solutions that are tethered to one or another ideology. It’s about what works.

Newman: But that’s an over-simplification of pragmatism.

Salit: How?

Newman: Being a pragmatist doesn’t mean you don’t make choices. You still have to make choices, you still have to make decisions, even as a pragmatist. Some of them are small, some of them are middle-sized, and some of them are large. But you still have to make decisions.

Salit: But isn’t he saying that decision-making doesn’t have to express ideology? If there’s a reset going on, going back to his “reset” metaphor, that’s what the reset is ultimately about, from his point of view.

Newman: But that’s what Obama is saying. He’s not, after all, calling for socialism. He’s calling for health care reform.

Salit: A certain kind of health care reform.

Newman: He’s calling for a reorganization of health care, via specific concrete things. But, at some level, there’s a recognition that if you keep calling for those kinds of things, de facto you’re calling for socialism. So forget whether you’re using the language or not, it doesn’t make a difference. That’s what’s going on. You’re calling for a change of attitude.

Salit: About the distribution or re-distribution of wealth.

Newman: Exactly. And some people say, I don’t want you to take more money away from me to take care of poor people, who don’t have as much as I do, who are unemployed. I don’t want to give up what I have for those people. So, there you go. Where’s your ant and grasshopper metaphor now?

Salit: The journalists debate what’s going on at these town hall meetings, asking “is this genuine or is this manufactured?”

Newman: They’re debating what’s happening?

Salit: Yes.

Newman: What’s happening is manufactured, but it’s genuinely happening. Not surprisingly, the right seized this opportunity to do some grassroots organizing of its own and the Obama people, apparently, took some time off at the grassroots level. That’s part of what happens when you get into power. You get busy trying to enact what you’re looking to enact now that you’re in power. So your attention turns away from doing the grassroots work.

Salit: And the right gets a little opening. Organizing for America, Obama’s grassroots network, has either been quiet or on vacation or they’ve been ambivalent about whether to go to their base for legislative mobilization. They held back on that with the stimulus package and, at least based on newspaper accounts, are having difficulty fully engaging that base on health care. They left an opening there and the right moved into that.

Newman: Not surprisingly. Obama won. The grassroots spoke. The left spoke. Now they’re in power. And the right’s trying to find its voice. The left didn’t win by so much of a landslide that there’s no longer a right. The right is very much alive. They’re just not in power. Some people say the town halls are a healthy debate. To me it looks like a bad family gathering.

Salit: It does. But sometimes you have to get through the bad and unproductive part of a conversation to get to a better conversation. I’m not so horrified by these meetings. People who believe in civil discourse – and I happen to be one of them – are horrified by what they’re seeing at the town hall meetings. I’m not horrified by it. It is manufactured, in the sense that it’s organized. But also people are getting up and they’re talking. They’re saying things. And they’re saying some things that are objectionable and some things that are nasty, whatever. But they’re talking. To me, that’s not a problem.

Newman: I see what you’re saying and I’m similarly disposed. What makes me concerned, though, is that I think this could be an opportunity to have a developmental debate. If it includes the kinds of things we’re seeing at the town hall meetings as a stage or a part of it, fine. But is there any real development in this process? That’s difficult in the absence of the recognition, as I was saying before, that history moves, not necessarily forward or backward or sideways, but it does move. And it carries with it its past, if you will. Are we going to progress off of this? That’s the issue of concern to me. Not whether someone’s yelling and screaming or putting a Hitler mustache on Obama. That’s bad art, but it’s not the end of civilization.

Salit: That’s important what you’re saying. How does that developmental debate happen?

Newman: You need some leaders, who are not partisan, but who are intelligent enough to understand history and progressive enough to understand what it means to create something new out of the only material available, namely something that’s already happened in history. Is Obama going to be that kind of leader? He’s got 2½ strikes against him, from day one.

Salit: Which are?

Newman: What are the 2½ strikes? He’s a progressive. He’s black. And the half is that he’s a Democrat.

Salit: Meaning those are strikes against him relative to being able to be heard by 40 to 45, maybe even 50 percent of the country? Maybe more? Is that what you mean?

Newman: I wouldn’t put it just in terms of being heard. It’s about whether he can convey that he’s not doing any of this to be a part of either the crazy debates taking place at the grassroots or the crazier debates taking place in Congress.

Salit: OK.

Newman: He wants to stand above that and move forward with history, but it’s very difficult to project that in America. This is a country without public philosophers. This is a country where that voice is often ruled out, even before it speaks. Is he able to project that as a Democratic president of the United States, at this point in time? I don’t know. History makes us wait and see.

Salit: It’s very hard to do that. And it’s very hard, even if you do that, for people to understand that that’s what you’re doing because everything is so immediately translated into the other kind of thing. It gets politicized, commodified, whatever you want to call it.

Newman: You can make out a case that only two people, it seems to me, have ever done that successfully in the history of this country. George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt and both did so under very unusual circumstances. In one case, the people said to George Washington, You won the war for us. You’ve created us. Whatever you say, goes. And in the other case, they said to Roosevelt, We’re up against international fascism. That’s really scary. That’s real. There it is. It’s right at our doorstep. So, we’ll go along with whatever you think is best. Even Lincoln didn’t do that successfully, meaning that all he got for trying was to get shot.

Salit: Right.

Newman: There’s not a history of that being something you can do in this country. Obama is a good man, a decent man. I think he’s trying to be responsive to the American people. But are the American people going to do this? I don’t know.

Salit: It’s so hard to find ways to do that and to express that. This is a fairly trivial or small example. As you know, we’ve been working through our national independent networks on this issue of the composition of the FEC, the Federal Election Commission. We’re putting a proposition in front of the White House this week that President Obama appoint one or more independents to the commission, which currently has three vacancies. This is an idea that is gaining a tiny, tiny bit of currency. McCain and Feingold just introduced a bill in the Senate calling for a re-structuring of the FEC to have three members, all from different parties and political persuasions. And, by the way, they’re the only two sponsors of the bill. I talked with the President of Common Cause about this issue last week and the leaders of Rock the Debates, the Transpartisan Alliance and others, including some former state election officials. The argument I make on behalf of independents is that we are 40% of the electorate and should have representation on the body that regulates elections. And part of my argument to Obama is that this would be an important reform, it’s the right thing to do, it’s the democratic thing to do. But I also say were he to do this, it would be a way of his sending a signal to the American people and to the political class that he’s willing to step outside of the partisan box on a process issue. Making such an appointment would have a force, a weight above and beyond having an independent on the FEC. The political buzz saw in Washington is so extreme that it’s not clear, in a day to day way, that it would make “a huge difference,” other than it would prevent the 3-3 deadlock on the FEC, which is the current situation. But Obama’s got to find ways to signal the American people that he’s not doing the things he’s doing because he’s power hungry or because he’s a Democrat or because he’s…

Newman: That’s very hard to do when you are a Democrat.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: And that’s the fundamental argument for electing an independent.

Salit: Well, Roosevelt was a Democrat, but the political climate in the country was different. First of all, as you say, the issue on the table was international fascism. That was the issue on the table and it was transcendent. So the fact that Roosevelt was a Democrat was a minor detail.

Newman: Yes, I agree with that. Actually, Bush and the neo-cons hoped that the fear of terrorism would be so transcendent that the American people would give them carte blanche. Bush’s idea was to terrify the American people around this. Terrorism is certainly scary. But it’s not terrifying in the same way that fascist rule by the Japanese, Italians, and Germans was in the ’30s and ’40s.

Salit: Back to what we were saying about pragmatism and ideology and Kurt Andersen’s “reset.” You said that his presentation of pragmatism is highly over-simplified. Is there such a thing as pragmatism that isn’t expressive of ideology?

Newman: Yes. All I said about it is that it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to make decisions. Actually, it’s ideologically-driven points of view that mean that you don’t have to make a decision. All you do is follow the ideology.

Salit: OK.

Newman: Pragmatism makes a tremendous demand on intelligent decision-making.

Salit: What’s the relationship between the rise of pragmatism or the appeal of pragmatism, on the one hand…

Newman: I don’t think it’s a rise or an appeal. I never said that. That’s not how history works. There’s no rise in history. History simply is what it is.

Salit: So, if the strategic debate is between capitalism and socialism…is that a fair characterization?

Newman: I would rather not call it “strategic,” but “underlying.”

Salit: If the underlying debate is between capitalism and socialism, is that pragmatic or is it…

Newman: Is what pragmatic? The debate?

Salit: That debate. Or is it ideological? People say it’s ideological. If you ask most people about an underlying debate between capitalism and socialism, they would say that’s an ideological debate.

Newman: I don’t think so. That’s not an ideological debate. Why is that ideological?

Salit: I don’t think it is, but it is positioned that way in the marketplace of ideas.

Newman: I quite agree.

Salit: OK. But it isn’t that. So if it isn’t that, what is it?

Newman: What is that debate, how would I characterize it?

Salit: Yes.

Newman: It’s a moral debate.

Salit: And the moral debate is over whether a society, a world, a people, a community has the responsibility for all members of that community.

Newman: That’s the debate.

Salit: So then capitalism and socialism are pragmatic approaches to organizing the world which are expressive of different moral views on that question?

Newman: What has to be shown – and I think that we are, in some ways, objectively closer to showing it and subjectively more distant from being able to show it than ever before – given modern technology and other extraordinary advances, is this: Is it possible to take care of everybody and still have ways in which those who do more, or have more, can continue to have more, though perhaps not as much more? Are we in a place where that can be accomplished so as to pragmatically resolve that contradiction? Now, some people think that we are. And some people feel adamantly that we’re not.

Salit: That’s what the people at the town hall meetings are saying.

Newman: Yes. They feel that the gain of reforming health care is going to be their direct loss. I think they act out in crazy ways sometimes, but so does the left wing. But I think they honestly feel that way.

Salit: I do, too.

Newman: And, I think the Republicans who represent them honestly feel that way. The bottom line argument is that this is going to represent, no matter how you play it, a loss for the people who currently have more. Ironically, what Obama and his people who are leading this current fight for health care forgot to accentuate is the issue of health. If people are unhealthy, the whole country, the whole society is less healthy, in a very concrete kind of way, in a very material kind of way. Sickness doesn’t recognize boundaries. I don’t think that’s been sufficiently emphasized in this whole thing. It’s been treated so bureaucratically. In some strange sense, Obama has presented this whole issue too politically. I think he contributed to making it political. It’s relatively easy to go after the insurance companies. The insurance companies are – whatever terms you use for bad people – use it here and you’ll be right. But that’s not the issue. I think the issue is how healthy – or unhealthy – we all are. He would have done better to focus – and this might sound utterly bizarre – if he focused the whole campaign to reform health care on obesity. I think that would have played much better tactically. Say, This country is too damn fat and we have to do something about fatness. And fatness is not the specialty of poor people. There are fat bankers and fat stock market analysts and fat nurses and, as a country, we have to take this seriously. I think that if he had crafted a campaign where that was the focus, what’s the right wing going to say about that? No, we’re not too fat, or something of that sort. He had to go out of the box. I know that’s not the traditional way to do a campaign of this kind, but I think you’ve got to step out of the box to have a real chance of winning this. Step out of the box into being a leader of a certain magnitude that you can win that fight and go down in history as the man who made American thinner.

Salit: And healthier.

Newman: But, he gave it to Congress. In part what that means is that he gave it to the people who are almost certainly going to do it in the “political way,” instead of taking it for himself and saying, I’m going to go around this country and say to the American people: You’re too fat. We’re all too fat. And I’m the President of the United States and I see this as one of my missions. I’m going to make us thinner and healthier.

Salit: And we’ll design a health care system that gives everybody access to what they need to be able to do that.

Newman: Exactly.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, August 9, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” and several Charlie Rose interviews.

Salit: We watched a NewsHour segment on Iran about Ahmadinejad’s inauguration and the “show trials” in which the opposition leaders are recanting – under duress – their prior positions about the illegitimacy of the elections. Some Iranian experts in the U.S. mocked the regime for insisting that there had been meddling by the West in the protests. And, so the reporting was ‘These reformers were forced to say things that they didn’t believe. They were forced to say that they were acting as puppets of the West.’ There is no dispute that there was duress, including torture. But that seems to be a different issue than the issue of whether the claim by the regime of “outside interference” is credible with the Iranian people.

Newman: Well, of course they’re under the influence of the West. It seems incredible to say otherwise. That’s the world we live in. Things are very interconnected. How could you think that they wouldn’t be influenced by the West? Was there anybody in the mix who was actually working for France who was attempting to destabilize the regime? Of course there was. I don’t speak much French, but I can tell you there was more than one person. That may even be a good thing, in some respects. In some sense, I agree with some of the right wingers from Stanford, from the Hoover Institute, who said that it’s absurd to say that the reformers weren’t working with foreign countries and with the influence of the West.

Salit: That doesn’t make the reform movement illegitimate, though. Whatever illegitimate means.

Newman: No, but you have to figure out some level of reliable information for a sensible pragmatic move. Not the “Truth.” Truth is out of the question. But pragmatically, what do you do? The person who’s best managed to do that, in my opinion, in this whole mess, is President Obama.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: He’s done well for us. Even conservatives like Joe Scarborough admit he’s done very well for us in foreign policy. Forget about domestically. There, we have to wait and see. But, these kinds of stories are a part of the game.

Salit: Well, spin or no spin, it was not that long ago, as in seven months ago, that the policy of our government towards Iran was regime-change. So, the idea that the regime in Iran would be able to say to the Iranian people What’s going on here is about efforts at regime-change that are tied to the West is not ridiculous. And Obama has to handle that carefully.

Newman: It isn’t ridiculous, except insofar as the whole thing is ridiculous. I think Obama is whittling away at that. Don’t forget, in some ways Obama wasn’t elected to solve the domestic crisis. For much of the time that he was running, there wasn’t a domestic crisis. He was elected primarily to change our foreign policy. Namely, Iraq.

Salit: Yes. So, on to the Clinton hostage release.

Newman: Good job, Bill.

Salit: Bill goes over, meets with the North Korean leader.

Newman: Smiles only when off-camera.

Salit: Smiles only off-camera, exactly. And brings the women home.

Newman: Exactly.

Salit: It was really a good play.

Newman: He was the obvious person to go to resolve this.

Salit: Apparently the North Koreans thought so. They asked that he come. And that gave me hope that the North Koreans aren’t totally off the deep end, living in a world of their own. Clinton was the obvious person because he’s a non-governmental figure, but also meta-governmental. Clinton was perfect.

Newman: Actually, it had to be somebody who’s not a governmental figure, but whose wife is.

Salit: So, one of the places that Chris Matthews went off of this was to talk about the relationship between the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party and the Obama wing of the Party. Chris says, ‘Well, they’re working together. They are basically a coalition.’ And then he says, ‘And Obama’s going to need the Clintons in the coming period.’ Why? Because he says one of the things that he’s going to need them for is that Obama’s support in the white working class is fraying and the Clintons can play an important role in keeping that base in place. Do you agree with that?

Newman: Obama and Clinton are both bigger than that. Come on, let’s give people a break here once in a while. They see a bigger issue. It’s Destroy the Republican Party when we have this opportunity. We can’t miss this opportunity. The Republicans are in serious trouble. The Clintons and Obama are surely united on that and so they’ll help each other.

Salit: It’s not just about holding on to some votes from Reagan/Hillary Democrats to win an election.

Newman: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are both enormously popular figures in this country and around the world.

Salit: Right.

Newman: So, it’s more a question of their having recognized that there is a basis for working together, not to resolve all their disputes, but to work together for some common interest. I think that common interest is best labeled as “Destroy the Republican Party.” And surely burying the force that has steered the GOP for a generation, namely right wing conservatism.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: They’re both interested in that. And so, they can talk to each other. They don’t have to agree on everything. If there was an election tomorrow and Hillary was running, they’d go right back to tearing each other down. They know how to play this game well. They’re both very good at that, in different ways. I think Obama is the best thing that could have happened to Bill Clinton in terms of Clinton’s legacy.

Salit: How do you see that?

Newman: Well, because Clinton has an opportunity under this kind of administration to breathe again, to be able to come out and do stuff. He wasn’t going to be able to do that under a more establishment White House.

Salit: Ironically, if Hillary had won, his hands might have been tied even further.

Newman: Maybe. But he wasn’t going to play any role internationally. But, Obama gets in and one of the first moves he makes is to put Hillary in as Secretary of State. And that’s what takes care of the whole thing. Now the doors are open again, and Bill is in.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: The doors are open for Clinton to come in, not as top banana, but as an ex-president. So, he’s in the game. And that’s good because he’s a good player. At some things, he’s extraordinary. Indeed, Obama (this is overstated) is so clean, that he even cleaned up Clinton. It reminds me of the Boy Scout pledge which enumerates the qualities of a scout, ending with “brave, clean and reverent.” Obama’s cleanliness is extraordinary.

Salit: It permeates all who travel in his wake.

Newman: Right.

Salit: There’s been talk about the Clinton/Gore tension and how this event brought them back together again.

Newman: It was Obama who brought them back together again.

Salit: OK.

Newman: Gore is into a lot of stuff that Obama wants to embrace.

Salit: Obama’s healing the Democratic Party.

Newman: Absolutely.

Salit: And what’s the relationship, do you think, between being able to heal the Democratic Party and being able to destroy the Republican Party?

Newman: I almost don’t know how to answer that because it seems, in a way, so obvious.

Salit: Can’t do with one without the other?

Newman: I don’t know if I’d quite go that far. But I do think that there are some in the Democratic Party who think that this is a big moment for the Democrats to make hay. Arguably, they will want to work together to do that.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: I think the problem, insofar as the Democrats have a problem with this, is the independent movement. Because a probable prerequisite for the independent movement to come in as the second force, is that you have to do away with the existing second force, namely the Republican Party.

Salit: So the Democrats find themselves in a position where meeting their own goals helps us to grow.

Newman: Yes. And, in some ways, as you know better than almost anybody in the country, it’s the basis for getting along, in a tactical sense, with the Democrats.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: I think that’s the fight of the future and it’s a good fight, a healthy fight. And I don’t think it involves targeting all Republicans. There is a fight going on inside the Republican Party between the neo-conservatives (who some call neo-fascists) who came very, very close to taking over the Republican Party, and the moderates. The neo-cons are not completely out of power even now.

Salit: Not at all.

Newman: They’re still there. As Joe Scarborough points out.

Salit: So, the question of the future is, does a nationally significant coalition between the Democrats and the independent movement emerge and sideline the Republicans and most particularly, Republican conservatism?

Newman: I think so. That’s the overall picture. You know, there are blips and movement this way and that way. But I think that’s the relatively long-term political landscape.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: And I think the most astute Democrats are well aware of that and recognize that they have to work to secure their relationship with the independent movement because they’re so dependent on it. I think Obama completely understands that. The Clintons are a little slow on that one. But they got hurt badly off of being slow, witness Obama’s nomination. But, Bill is a consummate political pragmatist, so even he may come around. But Obama is way ahead of Clinton on this one.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: That got him to the presidency of the United States.

Salit: Yes, it did. Thanks, Fred.

Newman: You’re welcome.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, August 2, 2009 after watching selections from “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and several Charlie Rose interviews.

Salit: The health care debate and the beer summit grabbed a lot of the headlines this week.

Newman: Yes.

Salit: We spent some time following the war story, the drawdown of American combat forces in Iraq while playing more of a support role to the Iraqi national army, combined with a build up in Afghanistan, building up troop levels and building up the strategic emphasis on U.S. policy in Afghanistan. I thought we might talk about that. We watched a Charlie Rose interview with Andrew Exum, a former military guy with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, who now is based at a D.C. think tank. Charlie Rose asked him what the president’s policy is in Afghanistan. Exum had a straightforward answer. Our policy in Afghanistan is to prevent it from being used as a base for transnational terrorist networks to plan and stage attacks against the United States and to do the same relative to it being a base for destabilizing operations against Pakistan. Obviously, both goals are indisputable, so I’m not asking you to make a judgment about their value. At the same time, one thing that Andrew Exum drew out is the extent to which achieving those objectives has become entirely meshed with our efforts to build up Afghanistan as a nation. And, he’s saying that one of the hard choices we’re going to have to make over the next year is the possibility of de-coupling those two objectives because it might not be viable to tie them together. How do you see that?

Newman: There are so many definitional questions to be asked here, that it makes approaching the question very, very difficult. What you said is correct. The objective is to make it less of a terrorist base from which to target both the region and the world. But the cultural assumptions embedded in the approach can get you into trouble. Those assumptions might not bear any relationship to how the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or ordinary Afghans look at this situation. Take the notion of “nation building.” Well, the insurgents probably say: We already have a nation. This is our kind of nation. What you mean by a nation is having democratic elections, the outcome of which favor Washington, DC. That’s not our definition of a nation. Arguably, this is them being realistic. It’s them saying: This is what we have. Force has always played a major role in who controls the land. And land is the primary source of wealth and power. Throw in the religious traditions and the long history of resisting any kind of centralized rule, and the bottom line is that you can’t relate to this situation as if it were Painesville, Ohio. This is not Painesville, Ohio. This is so far from being Painesville, Ohio that even the talk about nation building comes off sounding comic.

Salit: I imagine our military leaders feel the same way.

Newman: Not to be unduly cynical, and I do have a great respect for Obama, but I’ve become quite convinced that spending time in Washington distorts your world view. That said, it inclines me to say something that sounds very cynical. Namely, we’ve spent six years in Iraq because the neo-cons said an Iraqi invasion was critical for U.S. interests because of the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, even though there weren’t any in the first place. Once we invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein, and then proceeded to fight a war in Iraq, Al Qaeda showed up. So we ended up fighting them, or at least some of them. But that blunder, one could argue, has been (in some manner, shape, or form) corrected by virtue of a strategic shift to Afghanistan, which gets us a little closer to where Al Qaeda is actually based. However, where Al Qaeda has its most significant support network, everybody knows, is in Pakistan. And Pakistan is a nation, moreover, one that is ostensibly a U.S. ally. So a reasonable person might say, Why did we get into Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place? In one place we had to overthrow the dictator and deal with the consequences of that. In the other case, we’ve got to build a whole new state, meaning Afghanistan. When, all the while, the United States has real political connections to an actual nation, namely Pakistan. Why wouldn’t that be where we were focusing from the outset? So, if you want to argue that we’re now closer to the real source of things, because Afghanistan and Pakistan are contiguous and the border is porous, you can. But that’s so abstracted from the realities of what’s happening on the ground. Good grief. The United States government has told us for years that the former Soviet Union was the most totalitarian, imposing nation builder in the history of the contemporary world. But the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. So what chance does the United States, with its complicated, bureaucratic democracy have in accomplishing that in Afghanistan? It seems prima facie absurd.

Salit: The team of “outsiders” that General Petraeus sent in to analyze the Afghan theater came up with a similar conclusion. Anthony Cordesman, formerly the director of intelligence assessment for the Defense Secretary, offered up a very bleak assessment.

Newman: So, why is Obama pursuing this? Well, I don’t know. This could be total and complete ignorance on my part, but it almost seems as if we have to have some war over there in order to justify getting out of Iraq. Of course, that too is somewhat bizarre – maybe this is just my old-guard leftism coming out – but how did it turn out that the key to the Middle East is Iraq and Afghanistan? At the risk of sounding like an ugly American, I’m tempted to say, who the hell are Iraq and Afghanistan? Of course, we know that September 11th changed everything. I know it can be very touchy in this country when you talk about September 11th. It was a tragedy, an American tragedy, there’s no question about that. But I’m one of those who thinks it shouldn’t have dictated a change of focus for us, in terms of our policy towards the entire region. We needed – and still need – to find bin Laden and disable his entire operation. But instead we went to war. The error, which can’t be overcome now because we’re too far into it, was in how we decided to define the attacks of September 11th. Had they been defined as a criminal matter, which would require focusing everything on finding bin Laden, we’d not be embroiled in the consequences of changing our entire Middle East policy.

Salit: And, I suppose the irony is that we made a terrorist group on the radical fringe the center of U.S. policy in the region.

Newman: Yes. They certainly had to be dealt with. But the political and military mileage that they’ve gotten out of our response to 9/11 is hard to fathom. They got the U.S. involved in a way which favors them, in my opinion. Look, I’m a firm believer that in the long haul, by which I mean potentially thousands of years, the Afghan people will get to a stable and developed society. But not by virtue of our military presence and its endless costs, including loss of life. That’s not the route by which they’re going to get there.

Salit: In light of the magnitude of the mistake that you’re describing here, to talk about pitfalls of the current policy seems ludicrous. I would say that there are some strategists, and maybe Obama is one of them, who would be sympathetic to what you’re saying. Sympathetic in the sense that they wouldn’t deny what you’re saying. Then the position becomes – and Exum alluded to this – OK fine, we’re abandoning any notion of nation building, for all the reasons that you’re saying. Number one, it can’t be done. It’s never been done. It is a completely different culture. It’s a completely different economic reality. It’s a completely different religious framework. It’s non-negotiable terrain. So we can’t do that and we’re done with that. Moreover, being attached to that constrains us in certain ways. For example, if we’re trying to help Afghanistan emerge as a nation with democratic norms, the fact that we’re dropping bombs on an Al Qaeda compound and killing civilians in that process derails the nation building goal because it means the advocates of a democratic society are violating basic human rights. But if you take nation building out of the picture, then all you’re trying to do is destroy these terrorist networks. That’s basically what you do, and then the chips fall where they fall. This is the Catch-22 of the Afghan situation because you could pursue that as your strategy and say that nation building, humanitarian, development and democratic concerns, are off the table because they have no applicability here. We’re just out to destroy the terrorist networks.

Newman: Blow ’em up.

Salit: And, if you succeed in blowing them all up, you can’t really care about the civilian casualties you caused because your strategic objectives no longer require that you care about that. You’ve protected the national security interests of the United States.

Newman: Except what’s happened as a consequence of doing that.

Salit: Yes, exactly. I was going to say two things about that. One is that this kind of modus operandi on the part of the U.S. will grow the insurgency. That’s the Taliban’s calling card to the Afghan population. So, we’re in a situation where the policies that we’re pursuing are stimulating the growth of the enemy.

Newman: I don’t quite agree with that because that may or not be true. I don’t know. It’s an empirical question whether it does or doesn’t stimulate the growth of the enemy. But the more important issue is that it deters, in my opinion, further development in those areas of the world. And, if that part of the world doesn’t develop, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t continue to be attacks of varying kinds on the United States and our interests around the globe. We can’t be the richest nation in the world – our economic problems notwithstanding – with this region consigned to extreme poverty and lawlessness and not expect extremism and violence to continue.

Salit: One worries that we’ve put ourselves, as a nation, in a kind of lose/lose situation. One of the big pollsters, Charlie Cook, says that Obama is losing the confidence of the American people. He ties this to the health care debate and economic stimulus package and its lack of impact on joblessness. You’re not a pollster, obviously. I’m not asking you to analyze the polls that Charlie does. How would you characterize Obama’s relationship to the American public? What’s going on in that relationship?

Newman: What I was struck by in all the discussion of the health care bill and the potential resurgence of the Republican Party, was that there was not one mention of race. The basic Republican strategy is “let’s get the white working class behind us on the appeal of saying that we don’t want this country, which has always favored the white working class, to go completely broke by spending excessive dollars, disproportionately, on black America and others.” That’s the Republican appeal. You don’t have to be a genius to see that. Will that work? That remains to be seen. If it works, the Republicans will gain 20 seats or more in Congress in 2010 and who knows what else after that. If it doesn’t work, they won’t. Now is the moment for independent Americans, progressive-minded independent white Americans, to stand up and defend this president because it’s a more critical time. Voting for him was one thing. Certainly the country was desperate after Bush. So that’s one kind of statement. Now the real question is: Is there going to be an acceptable redistribution of wealth in this country, which really helps the poor? The rich are going to keep making money. But will the white working class support continued help for the poor, who are increasingly of color? They have not done it before. Will they do it this time? Obama’s about to find out.

Salit: I guess so.

Newman: We’re only at the barest beginning of this. The fight is yet to be had. Obama’s got some things going for him. He’s got some talents. But he also has a situation, a relatively good situation for making everybody, including the most backward elements of white America, line up against the multi-billionaires and trillionaires…

Salit: Against Wall Street.

Newman: But I don’t know how long that lasts because when push comes to shove, they might ultimately line up with the multi-trillionaire because he’s white. That’s what the Republicans are trying to craft right now. In these terms, I assure you, in these terms. In their inner circles where they feel secure that nobody is listening, they’re using this language.

Salit: Maybe what you’re saying is putting what Charlie Cook said in another way. Charlie says the “old polarization is coming back.”

Newman: Yes.

Salit: Now, the sports question.

Newman: The sports question.

Salit: Jim Brown, one of the greatest running backs in football and an African American activist, recently criticized Tiger Woods for not being more of a role model for the black community. How would you respond to Brown and, more generally, what do you think about the need our society has for role models, which athletes are often expected to be?

Newman: You always have role models. The most primitive cultures had role models. Someone does something well that succeeds in the broader culture. I don’t care if it’s a caveman father or Jim Brown or Tiger Woods or Fred Newman. A lot of people are going to say, That’s what I want to do. That’s how I want to be. Brown was a great athlete. Tiger’s a great athlete. So they’re both role models. And Brown’s been a role model who projects one black politic and Tiger is a role model who projects another black politic. There are multiple black politics, after all. And black America is going through a major transition. Brown’s comment is simply a sensible political observation from his point of view, within the overall struggle or fight, whatever you want to call it, in the black community. I don’t think there’s much more to say about it.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.

Newman: You’re welcome.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Every week CUIP’s president Jacqueline Salit and strategist/philosopher Fred Newman watch the political talk shows and discuss them. Here are excerpts from their dialogues compiled on Sunday, June 28, 2009 after watching selections from “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and several Charlie Rose interviews.

Salit: We watched a series of shows as events continued to unfold in Iran. There are two topics being discussed. One is what is it that’s going on in Iran? And the other is how is Obama relating to those events? Some analysts on The Charlie Rose Show described the authoritarian regime, the Ahmadinejad/Khamenei regime, as fragile. They see the huge popular outpouring against it, against the vote counting, and against the repressiveness of the regime, and they see fragility. Meanwhile, David Sanger of the New York Times, said on The Charlie Rose Show that one of the ironies of this situation is that the Obama administration’s philosophy is that the Bush team went off the rails when it got into regime change, while they aren’t interested in regime change. But now they’re in the middle of a situation where there is a potential for regime change.

Newman: I don’t see the irony of that. What’s ironic about that?

Salit: I presume Sanger would say the very thing that the Obama people wanted to get the U.S. out of the business of…

Newman: Right…

Salit: …is what they’re now, at least potentially, in the business of.

Newman: I don’t get that conclusion. That’s exactly what Obama is denying. There’s no inconsistency or irony. Obama’s position has been and continues to be, that he’s not in the business of regime change.

Salit: Right.

Newman: And, that if there’s any change going on in Iranian politics, it’s the Iranian people who are calling for it. In fact, Obama’s position is the exact opposite of the Bush position. So, I don’t understand the logic of the thinking which produces the conclusion of irony.

Salit: Maybe what they’re really saying, those that are seeing irony, is that no one expected there to be a serious domestic challenge to the current regime. But now there may be one.

Newman: Right. That’s how the world works.

Salit: Things happen that you didn’t expect.

Newman: Exactly.

Salit: So this thing in Iran, we’re not quite sure what it is, has happened or is happening. Let’s talk some about how Obama is responding to it. There was a narrative this week, coming from corners on the Left and the Right and the media: ‘Obama’s not speaking up strongly enough in response to what’s going on. He needs to be out there, more in front, supporting the protesters, vocally criticizing Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. He was slow to move on this.’ Chris Matthews interviewed Obama advisor David Axelrod about this who said ‘Basically, we didn’t want to get ahead of events. We don’t know how this is going to play out and we have strategic concerns which are our responsibility to be attentive to and to take care of.’ And, Obama told Chuck Todd of NBC News that it wasn’t his job to feed the 24-hour news cycle. It was his job to do what is in the best interests of the country, that he’s not going to play that game, and that he’s not going to have America be set up as the instigator of this whole thing. I guess the question is – does the critique of Obama’s timing go anywhere?

Newman: Well, I know we have to give a Talk/Talk, but my answer is no.

Salit: OK.

Newman: So far as I can tell from his public presentation, Obama is doing exactly what I would do. My position is obviously a lot smaller than Obama’s, but I have handled crises of one kind or another and I think that premature responses to something, when you don’t know what the something is – and part of why you don’t know what the something is, is because the something doesn’t know what the something is – is a prescription for making huge mistakes. And, to his credit, he’s not caving into the pressure to jump the gun.

Salit: Which is the opposite of Bush.

Newman: Yes, and I applaud him for it. I think it’s exactly the way to go, although I don’t know where it’s going. Nor does he.

Salit: And how do you feel about the characterizations that some people are giving that the Iranian regime is fragile?

Newman: Regimes have been called fragile and then lasted for centuries. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. I don’t know if it’s fragile or not.

Salit: Meaning that the fact there are hundreds of thousands of people in the streets doesn’t necessarily equal fragility.

Newman: In a more democratic society, having that many people out in the street protesting, would be an indicator of fragility. But Iran is not that kind of democratic society.

Salit: Millions protested the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson was forced to withdraw from a re-election bid and the Democratic Party lost the White House in 1968.

Newman: Yes, but Iran is not the United States of America and we shouldn’t try to fit it into our way of looking at the world. Although, I must confess, when one of Charlie Rose’s analysts said that Obama should make some statement about how seeing hundreds of thousands of people on the street in Tehran was “inspiring”…

Salit: David Brooks said that.

Newman: Yes, I realized that I didn’t hear anybody talking about how a million Americans out in the streets in Washington to protest the U.S. government policy in Vietnam was also inspiring. What’s more, we don’t even know what these people stand for. I certainly support their right to protest in Tehran. But who are they? I have a limited knowledge of the opposition candidate…

Salit: Moussavi…

Newman: …but his politics don’t sound very far from those of the current regime. It’s easy for the press, looking for a story by deadline, to talk about the American people being outraged by what’s gone on in Iran. But, the American people are characteristically un-outraged by election fraud.

Salit: That’s why both sides had to bus in protestors to Florida in 2000.

Newman: We’ve been working in the area of election fraud, election unfairness, for a long time. The commentators make it sound as if, if you did something like this in America, millions of people would storm the Board of Elections. But, millions of people don’t storm the Board of Elections.

Salit: No.

Newman: Obviously, Iran is different than the United States, and obviously this is not just about an election fraud.

Salit: Right.

Newman: There’s something else going on. But, I don’t know what it is. Nor do I know where it’s going to go. Now, if you were into regime change, I could see how you would think this situation in Iran is a golden opportunity. But given that Obama’s position has been that he isn’t into regime change, I don’t comprehend the analysis that says he should get on the “overthrow the regime” bandwagon.

Salit: I suppose some of them are trying to beat up on him.

Newman: So, they’re beating up on Obama. It goes with the territory. I’m a political person and I’ve been beaten up on in my life. It’s modest, certainly, relative to Obama, but I relate to it as serious. I try to listen to it, I try to hear it. But what you try to do, it seems to me, is you call everybody together and you say, Am I the leader around here or not?

Salit: Yes. And Obama has the support of tens of millions of people who elected him.

Newman: And, if that’s not the case, then we should move to a regime change. That’s the democratic way to react to it. And I think that’s what Obama’s doing.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: But at the moment he doesn’t know what the 200,000 or 300,000 people in the streets in Iran are going to do. I don’t think anybody knows. So, what’s he supposed to do? Send troops to Iran? That would be preposterous.

Salit: How did you react to the comparisons to Tiananmen Square? There were mixed views on this. Some said that calling the military into Tiananmen Square was successful in “putting the genie back in the bottle,” the democracy genie, that is. This argument is that the democracy movement was basically derailed by this show of force by the Chinese government. And then others said ‘Well, in China the regime did change off of Tiananmen Square.’

Newman: Yes. Dramatically so. What’s more, Tiananmen Square was not an election protest, because there were no elections.

Salit: So, what are you saying about that difference?

Newman: The regime in Iran thought it was in its interests to have elections because there’s a democratic tradition of some kind in Iran. This is very different than the situation in China. It’s hard to make the comparison. There are probably some people right now inside the Iranian regime who are sitting in endless meetings about this, who are saying I told you so. I told you we shouldn’t have elections. That was a big mistake. And other people are saying Well, it’s a tactic that will help us hold power over the long run and so it’s a good thing. Maybe you were right on this occasion….and we’ll get it back under control.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: I don’t know the exact numbers of injuries and casualties, but I think the reaction of the regime in Iran has been much more tempered than the reaction of the Chinese Communists in Tiananmen Square. The circumstances are fairly different. You know, comparisons like this can give you that nice pleasant feeling you have when you think you have an understanding of something. But, I don’t think that feeling counts for very much, historically speaking.

Salit: I felt that way about Brooks’ summary: ‘The 1979 Iranian Revolution was historic because it set in motion the regionwide movement for Islamic extremism, and this situation is likewise historic because this could turn out to be the thing that reverses that tide and begins the counterrevolution across the region.’ Maybe. But, it was just a little bit too tied up in a bow.

Newman: I quite agree. I don’t even know the color of the bow.

Salit: One other question on Iran. Bryan Puertas, who is a Talk/Talk reader, sent a note asking if you would comment on the impact of technology on the protests in Iran. Bryan says that it’s traditional for media coverage to frame the story that gets out to the world about social unrest and upheavals. But in this situation, the official media was very heavily restricted. Instead, it was individuals’ use of Twitter and the Internet and their cell phone cameras that got the story out.

Newman: I’m all for applying advanced technology to mass organizing. I think it’s a good thing and I’ve spoken about that on many occasions. But, one thing to point out is that both sides have access to technology and they use it in different ways. Probably, the real power in this kind of situation will turn on who has the most access to guns.

Salit: Not Twitter.

Newman: And that’s not to deny the significance of technology. But there are other factors in the world which play a role. I think the more technology is used to invigorate the democratic process, the better. My last comment, however, is this. For all the technology which everyone now has access to, I haven’t heard of a million messages coming to President Obama from Iranians asking him to have the United States intervene in Iran.

Salit: True enough. OK, to Mary Fridley’s sports question of the week. She says ‘Even though Tiger Woods didn’t win the recent U.S. Open, he is one of a very few athletes who’ve completely transformed the sport in which they play. Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan are also on that list. Although there are many very good athletes out there, this kind of special athlete doesn’t come along very often. How do you think they get to be who and where they are? Do you think that certain sports are more open to transformation? Or is the athlete so great that he or she will impact no matter what?’

Newman: Depends on the situation, really. Here’s what I think about Tiger, and it’s not from any personal or direct knowledge of him. It’s based on what I read in papers and magazines and so on and, of course, watching him play. I remember Tiger being on television when he was a little boy and his father, who was his primary influence and teacher, told him from the outset to swing as hard as he could. And, his Dad said, if you missed the last swing, don’t ease up on the next one.

Salit: OK.

Newman: Swing all out. This is Tiger’s credo. And it has had a huge influence on the game of golf over the last 15 years.

Salit: How’s that?

Newman: Golf used to be a much more strategic game, but there’s a new mentality about this. It’s the big hitters’ game now. There are some exceptions to that. But, it’s mainly a big hitters’ game and there’s a logic to hitting the ball as hard as you can, as far as you can, and then figuring out what to do with the lie that you get off of that. Golf used to be a very conservative game, in the sense that players tried to stay on the fairway at all costs. Which is a useful tactic in some situations but it’s not the general strategy of the game any longer. It’s a bigger game than that. It’s “go for the distance.” Yes, you’ll make mistakes, but in the long haul it’s how the game should be played. And Tiger proved that. Hit the ball as far as you can and then figure out some brilliant thing to do when you’re deep in the woods. That’s a transformation of the game. The mental aspect of the game used to be to never get yourself into a bad position. Don’t swing all out. That’s what I mean by the change of the game. Ironically, of course, Tiger doesn’t know that he’s swinging that hard. He’s never swung any other way.

Salit: He should be me for a day. He would know what it is to not swing hard.

Newman: There you go. But you’re not so unique among people who are learning the game.

Salit: That’s comforting. Sort of.

Newman: It’s a different game now. There are more and more people playing like Tiger, or at least trying to. Obviously, in the long run, someone will surpass him. He’s not going to be the king forever. But he’s got some years left. Having lost one U.S. Open does not end your career. Plus, it was a very unique U.S. Open. I don’t think Tiger would talk about it publicly, but he caught a lot of bad breaks. And, he had an opportunity on the 15th hole, to put a second shot right up near the pin, which he missed.

Salit: Yes.

Newman: All sportscasters go on record about this stuff, so I’ll take advantage of Mary’s question, since this is the only sports reporting I’ll ever do. Had he hit that shot, instead of winding up in the rough – he hit too hard, he didn’t play it conservatively – I think he had a real shot at making a run at the very end. But he didn’t. Nonetheless, Tiger’s here. He’s still the king.

Salit: We’re not talking about regime change in golf.

Newman: Not by a long shot, so to speak.

Salit: Thanks, Fred.