Commenter Archive

I agree with @oscar-gordon. It's a nice thought but I don't see how making legislators full time does anything to change the incentives that lead to lousy oversight of the executive branch and lack of expertise. I won't say that legislators have no incentive to oversee executive agencies or fix problematic policies but that incentive is complicated by political calculations and various partisan and other loyalties. A full time legislator will be as beholden to those things as a part time legislator. Further you can probably never explain an issue to someone who has a strong interest in not understanding that issue.

Think arguing sentencing reform to a person representing a district where the main employer is a prison, or the problems with fossil fuels to someone representing a district full of coal mines.

I see the phenomenon Saul describes as the natural result of mass/pop culture in a globalized economy. Super-hero movies, for example, are conceptually simple, translate easily into other languages, and do not challenge the audience politically or socially. The same can be said about most pop music. If you're in the entertainment business, why limit yourself to millions of dollars in the American (or even Western) market when you can make billions globally? Combine that with a post-modern American culture that sees itself less and less tied to religion/culture/community and you get people who treat the entertainment they consume as a deeply rooted part of their identity. To criticize the entertainment is to criticize the person. In such an environment, when the pop culture gets particularly insipid, the people who love it follow suit.

I do see it as part and parcel with an infantile streak in American culture that I think will be destructive in the long term, but that might be beyond the scope of this post/discussion. Of course I will cop to my own potential hypocrisy on this issue as a huge fan of cult horror movies and underground metal. Not pop culture, but certainly not high culture either.

I think you could make that argument about a lot of countries that for purposes of this conversation we would call prosperous and stable. Though as I said to Lee above it may be that this discussion isn't possible until some definitions are agreed upon.

Fair enough but isn't that moving this kind of far away from the original discussion about whether or not there's a pragmatic justification for civil liberties (or general liberalism) that isn't ultimately value based?

Granted as I'm typing this I think part of the problem with the discussion may be a lack of defined terms..

I'm a bit confused by your response. We both agree that a society could be stable/prosperous without civil liberties (or being socially liberal). If that's true then what's the pragmatic case you referenced for, say, freedom of speech or freedom of the press? By pragmatic I mean something we can't do without in order to make a society function, as opposed to just something we value.

I don't think the comparison of a political philosophy to religions, which are at least to some degree based on the supernatural, is apples to apples. There's also more to this than the pragmatic (your comment itself includes the value that bloodshed and chaos are bad).

Look at the example of China which has been able to develop at a rapid pace economically but remains repressive politically. This isn't to say they don't have plenty of problems and of course they're not fully industrialized but based on their example I think it's feasible that a society could be stable, economically prosperous, and still illiberal politically.

The universality you menton is very important. Corruption of power isn't a cultural problem, its a human problem. I think the discussion is conflating two separate questions. The first question is whether or not there are certain universal values or truths (or in the language of the enlightenment human rights). The second is whether or not one society has the moral authority (without getting into questions of competency) to impose those values on another.

I'd defer to Burt on that question and I do not have any familiarity with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act so can't really opine.

I do think there might be some parallels to the debate over whether or not the state should recognize more positive rights (as oposed to negative rights).

This piece was an excellent read on a number of levels. Maybe it's a part of my own Catholic baggage but I can relate to the difficulties of navigating that weird terrain where you recognize the inherently supernatural (i.e. hard for rational people to believe) aspects of the religion and try to square it with the passionate teaching of secular subjects by clergy and nuns.

All that aside, I do agree with concerns about overly catering to students. I try not to believe reports I hear about things as extreme as not teaching rape in a crim class in law school. It caters too much to my own biases about political correctness run amok. If it's really happening then the answer to any complaining student I think should be if you can't handle this you aren't fit to be a lawyer full stop. I only did crim very briefly at the beginning of my career but even outside of that as an attorney you have to deal with challenging subjects and even more challenging personalities in virtually all areas of practice. A lawyer can't be trusted to appropriately serve a client if a tough subject in the class room flusters him.

I'd say the same thing about people who think they should be exempt from undergrad assignments due to content. If you can find a way to pass without getting the credit then so be it, but again, I think the response is that college isn't for everyone.

All that being said, I do wonder how prevalent these attitudes are outside of certain groups on campus. Of those that do exist I tend to think that their views rarely survive first contact with the outside world.

The normal 7th inning stretch song at Camden Yards is Thank God I'm a Country Boy (preceded by take me out to the ball game for most games). Since 9/11 it has been preceded by God Bless America for Sunday games.

Personally I could do without the God Bless America stuff. I struggle to see it as anything but a weird self-imposed propaganda. It reminds me of the episode in Catch-22 where everyone has to sign loyalty oaths to get their meals at the mess hall.

Gotcha, makes sense to me.

@james-k I agree. Unfortunately I think the heavy handed approach has become a sign that a problem is being taken seriously. Bureaucracies of course also love the ability to enforce their will in a manner that inherently increases their power.

@oscar-gordon I'd actually take it a step further and say there should be a demonstrated threat to person or property. I do think there's a harm to abandoned vehicles being left for other people to deal with, just not a severe enough harm that it should immediately result in criminal charges.

Gabriel Conroy:

So, where are we? I accept the legitimacy of the point you bring up, but there’s also a sense of inevitability. So yes, I’m worried about it, too. But don’t know where to go from there.

I think a good start would be a reassessment of attaching criminal jeopardy to what amount to minor, unintentional regulatory violations. Culturally we seem to have decided that the best way to handle every problem is prosecution and through the criminal justice system without taking into account things like cost and diminishing returns. The strongest point in the previous post on this issue I thought was that while the OP is well equipped to navigate these types of problems without ending up behind bars that isn't true for many or most people.

It doesn't mean that we don't need regulatory systems or even that the trade offs aren't ever worth it if such systems will inevitably produce some arbitrary outcomes. It might mean however that such systems shouldn't be connected to the criminal justice system, or if they are it should be very difficult for the state to escalate these types of incidents to that level.

I think that is an overstatment. Obama is certainly better than, for example, George Bush was in that he has not overseen an unmitigated disaster on par with the Iraq invasion but that is a very low bar. He pushed hard for involvement in Syria and was only thwarted by a mix of hostile public sentiment and the fact that Republicans in Congress wouldn't approve intervention on the terms he wanted. The intervention in Libya has been a miserable failure for all of those Libyans we were supposed to be protecting and has left a barely contained vortex of chaos in North Africa. His drone warfare policies are problematic from both an executive power perspective and the fact that they're contributing to the further destabilization of already fragile or disintegrating countries like Yemen and Pakistan. I will give credit where credit is due on Iran and Cuba but I think his record is at best very mixed.

But all of that is besides the point. The point is that one can agree with the Democrats on some policies but still refuse to support them based on where they set their priorities and the manner in which they often govern. Take people whose main interest is reigning in Wall Street and fighting to ensure a reasonable standard of living. Sure, they're not going to vote for Marco Rubio but are they really supposed to support Hilary Clinton, a politician who based on her record and associations is as in the pocket of Wall Street and corporate money as any other establishment politician?

It's all a question of priorities and it's perfectly grounded to chose not to vote for a politician who puts yours low on their list, regardless of what else you might agree on.

I would agree that they don't deserve 0 credit just that the heavy lifting was done by people other than the establishment (maybe national is a better word) party. They definitely got on board once it became safer to do so politically and good for them but it's the folks who were filing challenges in court and making the case for it before it was popular who should get the props.

@saul-degraw I guess I would object to the characterization of pragmatic versus romantic (at least in this particular context). From my perspective it's more a question about priorities and what a given voter or group finds to be most important.

The most important issues for me, for example, could broadly be called civil liberties and oposition to endless military adventurism. I may generally agree with many Democrats on the need to maintain a social safety net and for government programs to ensure a sufficient level of economic well-being among all for democracy to function. However the Democratic party is, at best, an extremely unreliable ally on those former issues that are most important to me. The issues I agree with them most on in theory are the same issues they are most willing to compromise on in practice.

Now you're absolutely correct that at some point politics is about rolling up your sleeves, making compromises, and doing the best you can with what you've got. But that can be a hard pill to swallow for those whose priorities are always the ones that are given away at the bargaining table and I dont think finding it offputting is just the result of romanticism.

Fair enough points, the reason I thought you were making that assumption was based on the Nader reference. And maybe you're right, that the hard left doesn't give the Democrats enough credit for those things they do achieve. Of the two you listed I think the D's do deserve a lot of credit for moving the ball in a big way on healthcare but I'd actually give them a lot less on SSM. My recollection is thats an issue Obama and most powerful Democrats evolved on. The heavy lifting was done by activists at the state level, even if most Democrats ultimately embraced it.

I'm not a Democrat but I hear this sentiment often and don't really understand it. From the perspective of people further to the left the Democratic party takes their votes for granted then forgets about them once they're in office.

Maybe if pressed lefties of that variety would see a centrist Democrat as the lesser of two evils but if they fall in line without getting anything in return don't they render themselves electorally impotent? You're also making the assumption that the left really identifies with the Democrats which I'm not sure is true. Republicans may treat the Democratic party as the red vanguard but really it's a pretty muddled somewhat conservative (in the small 'c' sense) party by international standards. That's how I'd imagine the hard left sees them anyway.

I don't agree with where that logic leads. These people who run our government are given a lot of power and with that power comes responsibility.

I won't disagree with you that American democracy is flawed. Our citizenry is far too susceptible to propaganda and fear mongering. We aren't as sophisticated as we should be. We're fickle and short-sighted. None of that means we shouldn't strive for something better, even if we'll never have providence. That war killed 100,000 people, resulted in catastrophe for an already troubled region, damaged our international reputation in ways that are hard to reverse and cost a trillion dollars.

You shouldn't be able to give your approval to a disaster of that magnitude and still have a career, much less be rewarded with even more power.

Agreed. The fact that so many politicians who were on the wrong side of that issue still remain viable is a sad statement about American politics.

I think there are plenty of principled reasons to oppose Hilary Clinton for the presidency. My opinion has long been that anyone who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq is not qualified to be the chief executive.

She's an accomplished politician and there's no denying she has a certain type of competence but her brand of liberal interventionism is in practice neoconservatism-lite. I don't care about the idiotic theories spouted on talk radio. Its quite clear that she would carry the torch for everything that is wrong with American foreign policy and for me that's a dealbreaker.

I thought the Alien 3 this-is-not-a-directors-cut included in that set is actually pretty good. Not good loke the first 2 but you at least can get a sense of the vision. The movie disappointed me greatly when I first saw it but over time there are elements of it I've grown to appreciate. Fincher really got screwed in that whole process though.

@jennifer As with your below comment, I don't have any substantive disagreements here in regards to the challenges behind building that coalition. I do think that people in states where the Medicaid expansion is being denied will eventually get angry enough to do something about it though. I've read some news articles suggesting that is already happening, though as you note it hasn't led to any actual change yet.

@jennifer I find nothing to disagree with you on there. Maybe it's wishful thinking but I do hope Sanders finds a way to incorporate those views from BLM. I shudder at the idea of another corporatist Democrat with hawkish foreign policy views, though it does look like that will be one of the two realistic options come the general election.

@kazzy First I don't see how the argument that the next law will also be racist addresses my point. I mean, if we concede that then why not just give up altogether? The biggest advances this country has been able to make on race have been through a mix of outreach and public policy via statute and legal challenge. What is the alternative path in our current form of government?

Also where have I advocated not rushing to judgment? I readily concede that racial inequality is a serious and challenging problem to deal with and that we should be doing things now to deal with it. I guess I'm not understanding what realistic options are out there that don't involve working through our political and legal process as they actually exist.

Lastly I don't see where I've been dismissive of @jennifer. I'm just discussing the issues she's raised. I'm not a Republican nor do I have republican sympathies so I don't know what the reference to the SSM debate has to do with this.