winning is fast, humanitarianism is slow

Garance Franke-Ruta relays the most conventional of conventional wisdom:

In the end, though, the only thing that is going to matter to the American people is if Qaddafi goes, or is rendered forgettable. The polls show people want regime change. If the rebels regroup, and are strengthened, as seems to be happening, that will help shift perceptions of the intervention. But even as the U.S. backs off, and what remains of the operation proceeds under NATO leadership, intellectually and emotionally, America has taken a side in the conflict. And Americans like to win.

This is one of those speeches that was more for the experts than the American people. An address to the nation that will not resolve anything for them. The only thing that will make this intervention seem wise is if Qaddaffi goes, or rendered so isolated and powerless that he can be forgotten. (Should he go soon, that would make Obama seem very wise, indeed.)

"Seems," here, is everything.

That Franke-Ruta is right about the political fallout, I can't deny. This is the consensus, at least, that we can all agree on: if this situation is resolved in a way that seems like a win-- if we end up with a conclusion that can be spun as victory-- it will be good for Barack Obama, the Democrats, modern day Kiplings like Samantha Powers, and the continuing prosecution of the Forever War. But I beg you to consider the distance between our rhetoric of humanitarianism and what Franke-Ruta, and just everybody else, are saying for Obama to call this a victory.

First, please do consider Matt Yglesias and his pointing out that good consequences can emerge from bad policy and create bad precedents. (Yglesias has been consistently great on this topic.) Now think about why we are saying we are going to war: for the humanitarian reasons of protecting the Libyan rebels from slaughter at Benghazi, and as is now inarguable, of removing the dictator Qaddafi from power. Does it not strike anybody else that the political goal of claiming a "win" can be achieved without anything like long-term humanitarian gains for Libyans?

Everyone should read this history of humanitarian intervention from Adam Curtis at the BBC. The thing about humanitarian gains is that they are always conditional and temporal. What looks like victory in the short term sometimes looks like defeat in the long term. This is true simply on the level of achieving better conditions for the people you're trying to help, but it is especially true given the sad nature of human conflict. Consider this excerpt:

But Kouchner quickly discovered that victims could be very bad. There was an extraordinary range of ethnic groups in Kosovo.

There were:
Muslim Albanians
Orthodox Serbs
Roman Catholic Serbs
Serbian-speaking Muslim Egyptians
Albanian-speaking Muslim Gypsies - Ashkalis
Albanian-speaking Christian Gypsies - Goranis
And even - Pro-Serbian Turkish-speaking Turks

They all had vendettas with each other - which meant that they were both victims and horrible victimizers at the same time. It began to be obvious that getting rid of evil didn't always lead to the simple triumph of goodness.

Which became horribly clear in Iraq in 2003.

I am on the side of the Libyan rebels in comparison to Qaddafi. (Taking sides with them does not mean willing to support aerial bombing campaigns ostensibly in their favor, and the fact that this isn't plain as day only serves to underscore the sickness of our discourse on foreign policy.) But that does not mean that the Libyan rebels are "good" and that the outcome of their possible victory will be desirable. What terrifies me, and what should scare you, too, is the fact that the political fallout for the Obama administration and all of the hawks in the media will have nothing to do with the long term humanitarian picture for Libya.

Like Gore Vidal said, we live in the United States of Amnesia. Our news cycle moves fast, our attention span is short, and nobody cares about yesterday's news. I think anyone can imagine a situation where the rebels defeat Qaddafi and a new government is put into place, and the western world congratulates itself on a job well done, as Obama's approval ratings soar. Liberal hawks and neocons get even more entrenched in their views and self-satisfied. Meanwhile, Libyans will continue to wrestle with the consequences for decades to come. And the results could be all kinds of bloody and terrible-- perhaps we might even call it humanitarian disaster. With Iraq, we were temporarily forced to deal with the long-term consequences because we were occupying the country. Now, even though we still have 50,000 troops there, our attention has gone elsewhere-- while the constant violence and near total political breakdown continues.

This is a very frightening turn for democracy, when long-term human consequences of our actions are so divided from long-term political consequences. Whether you are happy, unhappy, or indifferent to our recent health care reform, we can be sure that Americans will observe the consequences of that change and their attitudes will have political weight. No such certainty exists regarding Libya and its outcomes. What will be remembered is the shallow, short-term rhetoric of victory, not the mature, unflinching and long-term understanding that genuine humanitarianism requires. Our regard for humanitarianism has passion but no depth.

Will the architects of this war still be talking about it in a year or three or five? I doubt it. And so political reality becomes further and further divided from humanitarian reality, in a conflict waged on purely humanitarian grounds. The only word for this is folly.

we don't have a worker shortage

Rick Santorum says we have a worker shortage when our unemployment rate is around 9% and the true joblessness rate likely several percentage points higher. Dan Savage, for some reason, agrees with him, and advocates allowing more immigration. We don't have a worker shortage. We have a jobs shortage. I think our immigration policy is daft, and I think anti-immigrant animus is very often driven by simple xenophobia and racism. But to say that what we need for the benefit of our economy is to drive down wages through importing more workers, after decades of stagnant real wages and spiraling income inequality, is nothing short of cruel.

Nothing is stranger to me than the "workers have it too good" school of "progressive" thought that is out there right now. Workers have taken it on the chin in this country for 30 years. A coordinated and explicit campaign was begun during the Reaganite/Thatcherite revolution to "discipline" workers, and boy, have we disciplined them. Meanwhile, nothing at all has been done to discipline the financial sector, despite the massive damage that sector has done to our economy and civil society. Companies are recording record profits but are not creating new jobs. To give in to these corporations by continuing to lower the cost of labor is the absolute opposite of what we should be doing now.

The improvement of workers' rights, safety, and compensation that occurred from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century was one of the greatest improvements to human welfare in history. Period. Labor unions, and eventually, workplace regulation, changed the conditions for workers from dangerous, dirty, poorly compensated, and totally under the power of bosses to far safer, far cleaner, far better compensated, and far more powerful. This is a non-negotiably positive social good, and it is at the very heart of any left-wing project. You cannot claim to be on the left in any meaningful sense if you want to worsen the conditions of workers. Yet I keep encountering this bizarre strain of supposedly left-wing argument that advocates for worse conditions for workers-- less bargaining power, less regulation, worse compensation-- to... do what, exactly? Hope that this will result in corporations doing better things for workers? We've been waiting on that hope for decades. Enough.

Here's what we do: force them to spend. Force them to create new jobs. Give them a simple, stark choice. Cap the amount of capital that a corporation can sit on without creating new jobs, and dramatically tax that capital if they don't. Tie taxation to a ratio between profit and job creation. Force their hands. Because this way is not working. They are not giving us what we want as a society. It's an abusive relationship that we have with our corporations and its time to stop trusting them and waiting and instead compelling them to give back.

Meanwhile, I would hope that bloggers who advocate worse conditions for workers because of some kind of corporate-deferring "realism" would consider the median household income in this country, their own wealth, and the fact that they never advocate for policy that will hurt their own bottom lines. Might be a good idea to introduce a little of that perspective.

quote for the day

"I made it clear that Qaddafi had lost the confidence of his people and the legitimacy to lead, and I said that he needed to step down from power." -Barack Obama

"you see an old woman...."

I quote this commenter not to pick on him particularly but because this bogus metaphor is so common:

I see a frail old woman being assaulted by someone much smaller and less powerful than myself. I can easily intervene and prevent further suffering on her part, but I stay out of it because I don't want to interfere with her right of self-determination.

You are not the United States or its military. Libya is not an old woman. Morality does not translate through metaphor.

"Libya" is not a distinct entity. It is made up of many actors. An old woman has individual agency. A country has a vast sea of divergent opinions, intents, and interests. Whatever else is true in this metaphor, the old woman isn't hurt by me. In real life, Libyans-- "good," "bad," and every shade between-- will be killed by our aggression. Of all the self-congratulating bullshit narratives that have been totally undone by this intervention, none tells more about the American character than the return of the canard of war without civilian casualties, of war where only the "bad guys" are hurt. American ordnance will kill children in Libya. Libyan rebels are in the process of assaulting and murdering pro-Qaddafi loyalists. Squeeze that into your metaphor.

I beat up the person assaulting the old woman. He recovers, some day. I can use non-lethal force to save the old woman. If I got it wrong, somehow, the consequences are not permanent. There is no such thing as non-lethal military force, no matter how much you might want to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend. People who are knocked down in this war never get up. There's no such thing as a smart bomb. Children die. Innocents die. Grow up. Grow up.

Finally: in the metaphor, I choose to intervene or not intervene. I fight. I risk my physical health. I risk maiming or killing another human being. In this situation, with war on Libya? Nobody is asking me to actually fight. Nobody on the Internet is proposing that they themselves go to fight. They are instead asking me to do what they are doing, which is to write blog posts calling for military action from thousands of miles away. They risk nothing and sacrifice nothing, but as the metaphor shows, they are desperate to believe that they are achieving something in telling other people to go kill in Libya. "Liberal" hawks never fall out of love with the idea that telling other people to go fight and die is courageous and virtuous. And when they are done, they turn off their Macbooks and go to bed.

Funny thing about virtue: it comes only with sacrifice. Funny thing about courage: it comes only with personal, physical danger. Funny thing about righteousness: it never, ever operates by metaphor.

amen

Update:

sympathy for the juice box set

I feel a little inspired by this weird, pointless mini-profile of the not-so-young Turks who are the perpetual fascination of the New York Times. First, though, do read Anne Friedman, who is completely correct. (The Grey Lady is such a white dude.)

When I talk about DC insiderism, I think people tend not to appreciate that when I say I have some sympathy for the people working within the bubble, I'm telling the truth. I feel compelled to criticize the pathologies of the well-connected because political discussion has an impact on political policy and policy has an impact on real human lives. But the really important point is that the petty corruptions of DC are so vexing precisely because they aren't the product of personal failings, but rather are conditioned by the professional and social incentives of DC. If the dynamics that unduly affect the attitudes and convictions of professional bloggers, journalists, and pundits came from obvious and stark choices, they would be far easier to counter. Fighting corruption is at least more direct when it comes in the form of a wad of bills. It's harder when it comes from the soft influence of friendship and the ever-present worry about future jobs. (If a young, inspired blogger feels like blasting the Atlantic, he or she may instead offer qualified, muted criticism, based on the chance of eventually working for that magazine, for example.)


I'm encouraged by this article in that it seems like the bloggers of my generation (late 20s) are coming around to the realization that, new media orthodoxy aside, they are not the same insurgent forces working against establishment media but now firmly ensconced in that media. For sure, there have been many positive changes brought about by the blogging revolution, no question. But for too long, many young, influential bloggers operated as if they could at once maintain their kid-at-a-keyboard pose while rising higher and higher in the cutthroat world of DC media. That tendency led them vulnerable in many ways, most importantly to failing to recognize their own personal biases and blindspots, but also to the kind of vicious professional warfare that the Journolist imbroglio represented. Is Ezra Klein one of the dozen most influential media figures in our country? I think he is. What the Journolist situation showed (and I am firmly on the side of the members of that listserve, at least in contrast to the Daily Caller et al) is that you can't have both the Rachel Maddow appearances and NYT love and still maintain a breezy amateurism.


But it's important to remember-- there was no guidebook for these people. New media members like Klein, Matt Yglesias, Annie Lowrey, Dave Weigel, and Ann Friedman were making it up as they went, and they were doing so in an atmosphere that took new media triumphalism to absurd levels. In that context I can't level too much blame on them for failing to recognize their own power, or for failing to recognize the ways in which they were rebuilding many of the old media biases and impediments to free entry. That so many of them eventually became co-opted into traditional media and think tanks only serves to demonstrate that the forces that shape media bias are more powerful than technology can easily overcome, and that it remains extremely difficult to make a living as a truly independent blogger. And unlike other new media pioneers like Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, Glenn Reynolds, etc., these young bloggers didn't have a history of working in traditional media or consistent income from day jobs to fall back on.


Lest you are afraid that I am going soft in my old age, fear not. The Cool Kid Crew (which is not the same as the Juice Box Mafia), having marginally changed some of establishment media's many dysfunctions, blind spots, and power imbalances, have been building new ones all their own. I don't think it is fair or practical to tell people not to make friends with those around them, but the cliquishness and social conditioning of being a young hip politico in Washington DC inevitably creates conflicts of interest. It was another weird Times profile that helped crystallize just how social conditions can make dedicated people myopic and insidery. "Those who link together, drink together," goes the profile, which is another way of saying that those who drink together, link together-- the needs best served by professional bloggers will always be the their needs and the needs of people just like them.

(That piece is also handy for giving us an exact date for when the concept of "cool" finally died, as it contains the line "These bloggers are the cool kids who know they’re smart." From Charlie Parker playing a sax to bloggers sitting on a couch in less than a hundred years.)

In any event, I do think that the quotes from the (white male) bloggers in the more recent piece reflect a sensibility that is much more honest about the status of these people-- that is, a status of privilege, firmly ensconced in the establishment, and buffeted by all the usual forces that make conventional media what it is. Ultimately, people like Klein have developed personal brands (ugh) to the point where I don't worry so much about them; they'll be fine. Who I do worry about are the younger set, still trying to make a name, many quite smart and principled, but in a brutally competitive atmosphere where they must constantly ingratiate themselves to those in power and thus are continually pressured to instrumentalize all of their relationships. I have genuine sympathy for them, I really do. I just reserve the right to say when they're full of it.

What's the perfect way for professional journos and taste makers to operate? I don't think there is one. I think that there has to continue to be a number of high profile, truly independent voices who don't live in DC and don't draw their main salary from blogging. The trouble is, well, like mine-- I may have rendered myself unemployable in non-media jobs, would never get offered a job in establishment media, and would feel compelled to not take one if I was. (There's nothing like integrity in that conviction, as integrity requires sacrifice, and like I said-- nobody would be lining up for my services anyway.) But nobody ever said that speaking your mind has no consequences! That's adult life, yeah?

Have as much sympathy and understanding as you can muster for the people in the system; criticize individuals when they make choices that are unprincipled; constantly recognize that the system is inherently corrupting and bent towards protecting establishment power. And try to be less of a dick. (That one may be just for me.)

first principles

The reed in the wind blows further and further. I confess: the idea that the rebels winning at this stage represents some sort of a mea culpa-inducing event-- when the person making that claim himself voiced many arguments that have nothing whatsoever to do with who wins-- is simply bizarre to me. (Perhaps Andrew could tell the sub-Saharan Africans currently being disappeared by the Libyan rebels that the only question that matters is who wins and who loses. That ought to comfort them.)

So let me ask you all this question. I've read some Oakeshott, and I've read some Burke, but obviously I'm no expert. Can someone, pretty please, articulate any argument-- any argument at all-- that Oakeshottean or Burkean conservatism could ever support the Libyan war? I am truly straining to imagine any space whatsoever for such support. Perhaps the more informed among you could explain it to me.

Of course, I think neither conservative icon could support the kind of thinking that is so endlessly fungible as Sullivan has displayed these last few months, either. But what power have Michael Oakeshott or Edmund Burke against the cult of Obama?