That Old Road And Good Intentions
Jan 20th, 2009 | 10 responses
As we mark the transition from one administration to another there are many problems to be solved and many proposals for how to solve them. Part of the process of solving these problems is to examine how they came about so that we can prevent them from happening again.
Looking back in history we can see a number of examples where we entered into policies that we thought would have good results and began with the best of intentions and yet today we see the results have, if anything, made the problems we sought to solve even worse.
Forty years ago we were in the midst of the Great Society agenda of President Lyndon Johnson. Swept in on a wave of liberalism the Congress followed him into a wide range of new programs intended to resolve the horrible face of poverty as well as the many problems of the inner cities.
Two programs that were passed during that period led to a major increase in urban planning and aid for federal housing programs and a major expansion of the welfare state with policies that helped to provide support to families and children It was hoped that the urban planning programs could provide good housing for the inner city poor while the social programs would allow families to provide for their children and also help women trapped by economic circumstances in bad relationships.
Unfortunately these great intentions did not exactly pan out the way they intended. The urban planning and housing programs simply moved people from small homes and apartments with some crime into large projects with massive amounts of crime. People who had felt pride of ownership in their small house/apartment now felt nothing for the impersonal towers of stone, leading to a breakdown in the neighborhood.
Churches that had once been the social hub of the community were now far less able to provide support to tens of thousands of people in some of these towers.
Similarly, while the new aid programs did provide important help to people in need of support these programs have, according to many inner city activists, led to a further breakdown in the family unit in the largely Afrcian American urban communities. When you look at how the divorce and illegitimacy rates have soared over the last 40 years it is hard to argue with this point.
Now I am not going to argue that many of these programs have not been helpful, indeed we did have unacceptable levels of poverty in many parts of our country and it is important to make sure that we help as much as possible. But it is also true that large scale government programs sometimes create new problems while solving the old ones.
The same kind of mistakes helped get us into our current problems. As far back as the 1970′s there was discussion of how important it was to help the average family get into the arena of home ownership. During the 80′s and 90′s programs were put into place to encourage this goal. Programs like Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac helped people who could not otherwise afford homes purchase them.
The problem of course was if the people could not afford the homes then getting them into properties was creating a time bomb ready to explode sometime in the future. The same thing can be said for deregulation, the idea that helping to cut back on regulation to allow business to expand was a good one but not when that deregulation went too far.
And of course the worst part of all of these examples, from the 60s through today is that they all had broad bipartisan support. Many Republicans backed Great Society programs and the policies under President Clinton to expand home ownership. Similarly, many Democrats backed deregulation and the loose rules at Fannie and Freddy. The few voices of dissent, if any, were generally fairly meek.
I bring all this up because I think it is important for President Obama and his team to move carefully in passing new programs to deal with the current crisis.
Many on the left are pushing for significant expansion of government power in most of the economic sphere, with agendas for everything from National Health Care to huge stimulus packages to massive new regulations of just about everything along with a variety of other new programs.
Many on the right are opposing all of this on instinct, calling for even more tax cuts and opposing any new spending as well as questioning any new regulatory programs.
Arguments can be made for both sides of the debate, and it will likely end up that we pass some mixture of these proposals, but the most important thing is that we look very carefully at how policies like this have worked out in the past and consider how they might work in the future.
Large government programs often cause more problems than they solve, yet simply counting on the ‘free market’ to take care of things has not exactly worked out over the past 50 years.
I have no doubt that everyone from left to right has the best intentions for our nation, the key is to take things carefully and accept that sometimes your side is right, and sometimes the other side has the solution.
10 Responses to “That Old Road And Good Intentions”
What I find most troubling is that we so often end up with the worst of each side- a blend of liberal and conservative policy which picks the worst aspect of each (or at least, when in the particular combination the effect is the most negative one.)
Liberals and conservatives need to pick their battles more carefully, I think, and become smarter about the overall policy direction they promote. As it is now, each side battles for a relatively pure version of their political philosophy and wins some and loses some- but there's no overarching view of which battles should be ceded to the other side and which might work well in combination with the 'other' policy.
So what we often get is a program that sounds good (as you point out, having obvious good intentions) but no possible way of working. Way too often, the interface between government and the private sector winds up removing the positive effects of market forces like the ability of the market to provide incentives and corrections.
One example is our monetary policy. Certainly it's good that the Fed can control the flow of capital to help buffer the economy from sudden contractions. But instead of being used as a buffer against the extremes, it seems that we've deluded ourselves to think that almost all contraction could be avoided. The result of course is the current situation, because the expansion we've experienced has been mainly artificial.
I could make similar arguments for regulation- which is often applied haphazardly and enforced even more capriciously. Or consider the effects of many social programs on personal responsibility.
I think it's important for centrist politicians to become the mediators of these policies in ways that make sense. Rather than choosing the battles according to how stubborn one side or the other is (deciding which battles can be easily won or lost, who is willing to compromise on what), the battle lines should be drawn according to what actually works and what is good policy. These centrists would also, of course, have to have a more intense dialogue with voters in order to address the incalcitrance. If they can convince enough voters that the pragmatic approach will have the best result, then the fringes on each side will be marginalized.
One reason this doesn't happen though is that we don't allow that kind of dialogue. Too often, we allow the misdirection by our elected officials who draw partisan battle lines instead of policy ones. Instead of being appropriately skeptical of all of our politicians on both sides of the aisle, checking to be sure they aren't just paying lip service to solving a problem, we tend to believe that the ones on 'our side' are sincere while the opponents are not. I think we too often fall prey to this trap:
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” — Thomas Pynchon
Let's resolve to, together, make those good intentions work…
Yeah it's weird that in almost all other aspects of life, “compromise” means “let's find a workable solution that isn't purely what either side wants, but something we can both agree to do” while in politics “compromise” means “I will let you have this policy I don't like at all, if you let me have this other policy you don't like at all.”
The economic stimulus proposed by Obama is like that, where economists say that the large amount of tax cuts won't help very much, the Republicans say they are concerned about the ballooning deficit (haha) and yet for some reason if they include them then it'll have a greater chance of getting passed? That's not a compromise, that's a bribe. [Of course I don't think the stimulus will help very much at all, and that the intention of it shouldn't be to try to stop a slide but just lay foundations for recovery. So the entire emphasis is on the wrong things, and if they try to stop the slide then we have a good chance of everything failing.]
Now I've said this before, but here's where I don't think “centrism” can help. Too often centrism is defined as a balancing of ideologies instead of containing any ideology itself. Well I think that in order for there to be an actual Third Way, it needs to be proactive and ideological.
Really though it is hard to do this because it's not a matter of “fringe” vs “center,” but “past” vs “present” understanding. By that I mean that our ideological sides were drawn up decades ago, and in that time we have discovered an amazing amount of stuff that doesn't make it into political (or even scientifically political) discourse. Economics is the best example, where it basically needs to be redone nearly from scratch with different assumptions. I think poverty, affirmative action and discrimination laws are another — obviously not based in new scientific understanding, but the fact that race, gender, sexuality and poverty has a different meaning in today's climate than the 60s. And then of course there is tons of thinking that needs to be done about how to deal with the upcoming energy crisis (an decreased consumption in general), which is not just a matter of finding new sources, but most likely moving away from a suburban sprawl model.
What I'd really like to see is a political party that not only is grounded in “pragmatic” (i.e. factually other than ideologically based) solutions, but is humble enough to recognize that there are no solutions; meaning that any attempt to address one problem will create a new sequence of other problems. It's not that there is some magical set of rules that we can find and be perfect, but a radical intellectual change that accepts the dynamics of human interaction requires constant reassessment of assumptions and reworking of ideas. There is a lot of this type of debate going on on the economic blogs right now, so there are the beginnings of a shift in understanding…but it's very Tao-like and a huge departure from modern thought. Obviously I'm not holding my breath this will be a large movement soon, but it's interesting that someone like you and me can disagree a ton about things using the current paradigms, but whenever we talk about how perception of the world free from those, it's almost complete agreement.
it's interesting that someone like you and I can disagree a ton about things using the current paradigms, but whenever we talk about how perception of the world free from those, it's almost complete agreement.
Yes, I agree…and although I'm obviously more 'old school' about any number of things, I think that anyone with any intelligence who is paying attention at all can see that the old ways need to give way to new ones. I actually loved the Obama who spoke today because he showed an understanding of what was good and important from our traditional values but also the need to approach problems in a transformational way. I felt that he's got a young man's energy and vision but an old soul's grounding in the past.
Yeah, well it's like his line here “But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true.” In my own experience, I've found that my generation tends to have a conservative (old) value system when compared to my parents' generation, but that we have a “liberal” implementation of that value system. I talked with my family a lot about that over the holidays and they thought it was really interesting and asked what Obama was in that and I said he was someone that understood my generation's way of thinking. I also said that whereas my perception of what they were like when they were my age, they defined themselves in terms of opposition to status quo, while my peers just tend to ignore it completely and talk amongst ourselves about how we want to do things. My grandparents said that was exactly what they did coming out of the Depression and WWII where everything was a clean slate but their parents were still fighting old battles, and that my generation would be the one to help restructure American society and to expect the next one to rebel against that.
Anyway you haven't been around in a while, have Obama's actions since he was elected made you more or less nervous?
Anyway you haven't been around in a while, have Obama's actions since he was elected made you more or less nervous?
I'm not sure if 'nervous' is the right word, but less concerned, certainly. I generally have a more favorable view of him though it's a cautious optimism. I was always aware that campaign rhetoric isn't a good measure of the man, and that his extreme liberal voting record was also potentially due to catering to a particular constituency. I guess I'd say that I see a lot more evidence of what was always claimed of him- a desire for postpartisanship and pragmatism over ideology- during the transition than during the campaign. In that sense, of course, those who supported him can say “I told you so” and yet really they gave that support without evidence so it was a leap of faith.
I've seen a few things that suggest naivete still, but also a lot of signs that he's either always been less liberal than he let on (esp on national security) or he's been a liberal mugged by reality during the transition when the classified briefings began (I mean wow- that line in his speech telling the terrorists that they can't outlast us? Would have been nice if he and his party had thought of that in Dec 06 when the surge was being hotly debated.)
I've also seen a lot of positive character traits- showing leadership when it was appropriate and deference to Bush's position when that was appropriate as well.
On balance, my view is much more positive though I know I'll still disagree with an awful lot and I also know that no one has the answers and there are no answers that can really avoid significant pain in the near future.
It is difficult to give evidence of something as fundamental as a world view. I've never supported Obama because of his positions, I've supported him because of his thought process…reading things that gave hints he interacted with the world in a way I very much approve of both when it comes to internally making decisions and externally interfacing with the world to get support and gather data. For several years now I've read him give interviews about very specific topics, and it was never his implementation that impressed me as much has his response to challenges about his implementation and his subtle shifting of views as time went on in response to those confrontations. I think he has a very good chance of doing the wrong thing a lot of times, but only if he's not exposed to all the sides and facts, or when external pressure forces him to work within a particular paradigm that is fundamentally flawed but he doesn't want to expend all the energy necessary for a radical change.
It's difficult to convey this a lot when even phrases have different meaning based on world view context. I mean I don't want to get into a full discussion on the surge, but just to use it as an example — he's still against The Surge as much as he ever was, and I am as well. That's because while the decrease in violence is amazing to me (and he has said so as well), the fundamental landscape has not changed one iota. In fact, it's gotten appreciably worse, and the Iraqi government merely postpones all the decisions that would trigger civil war. The vote on Kirkuk for instance has been postponed for years by now.
So I hear something very different when I hear “can't outlast us” because to me there is often strength through calmness. By that I mean that many people opposed the surge because we believed it would actually put pressure on the terrorist groups. Al Zarqawi was not killed because we outfought him, but because he attacked areas where we had little presence and people got fed up and turned on him. So the argument was that since the Awakening had enough firepower and control to take out the terrorist groups any time they wanted, we shouldn't do the surge but instead step back and take away the rationale of the terrorists completely. It was then that they would be destroyed (which incidentally is pretty much exactly what happened, as Petraeus himself said a lot of the effects were from giving the Sunni areas greater autonomy and making them feel less threatened by our troops).
On the flip side of that argument, is the idea that the Shiite/Sunni/Kurdish parties are fundamentally opposed to each other and there was little we could do about it. We were very skeptical that the Surge could achieve the goals of leading to political reconciliation and would end up just arming all the sides (or we'd be forced to pick sides). Again, on that account, Petraeus has said that the strategic political goals have failed, and that he thinks it will be a 20-30 year process. So then the question becomes whether we want to commit the resources and time to spend several decades over there trying to put together a splintered country (Petraeus was fully in support of that idea but I think it's unpopular). That is a completely different question than the terrorists.
So I think if you found comfort in what he said but disagree with what I said (which I am relatively sure is an accurate representation of his beliefs based on many interviews I've read) then you are setting yourself up for disappointment. I just wanted to point out that his intentions and methods are way different than what the words have normally meant……but he is still very much an interventionist as opposed to the view (one I loosely but am increasingly share) that the US should simply step back from the world. So while I opposed the Surge on strategic grounds that I felt it would further our objectives, I am increasingly questioning the validity of our objectives and whether we should just pull back and become more domestically oriented in general. That's something Obama doesn't believe at all.
Well, since you've followed his views more closely I assume you are right about the interpretation; however, I disagree that there's as much distance between what you say he meant by that phrase and what I'd like to think it meant.
The problem I think is that no one is saying the surge succeeded because of sheer military might; I think you're setting up a false dichotomy between whether we 'out fought' Zawahiri or not. The surge involved a change in strategy as well as an increase in number of troops and neither could have been possible without the other. The 'backing off' couldn't occur when there was no possibility of security for the nonmilitant civilian population, and that's why a surge of troops was necessary.
I also disagree that things have gotten worse or that a delay on the Kirkuk referendum is a problem. I think it's too early in the process to make a determination on Kirkuk; the sides haven't come to any kind of reconciliation that could preserve the fractious union between Kurdistan and Shia and Sunni Iraq at this point, and Kirkuk would have likely been a fault line.
Anyway, I didn't mean to veer off into policy discussion like that but I still think it's significant that he'd even include a line that is sure to be more popular with conservative hawks than with the netroot left. Regardless of whether or not my interpretation is completely accurate, it still shows a resolve to stay engaged and a recognition that we can't cede the propaganda victory to terrorists who would see our premature withdrawal as a retreat.
No you're right. The Surge ultimately was a change in tactics and strategy and that is something that was often said at the time but I disbelieved. They did a very good job of actually implementing it how they said and should be commended, especially because they made changes that were unpopular with troops on the ground and most likely temporarily made things more dangerous, with the belief that over the long run things would be safer. I would quibble that the no possibility of security was primarily about terrorist/criminal groups — although that was definitely a part of it — but more about cross fire in a smoldering sectarian civil war by parties that are still around and active in governing, and think that should be the primary driver for our Iraq policy. There are only a few thousand active terrorists, and they are going to try to spin anything as a victory, it's not about what they do but whether their message has any resonance with normal people around the world that matters.
But hopefully things will turn out OK in Iraq and if they do then obviously the Surge is the main driver. I just still see no end in sight…and even if it doesn't turn out OK in Iraq, that doesn't mean that the Surge was necessarily wrong. It definitely gives a very good blueprint for conflict, and perhaps if we started out with that strategy then things would already be fine. In fact I'd say the actual nuts and bolts are pretty close to a real life example of the kind of solution we've been saying we want about paying attention to realities and having a new solution that is synthesized independent from the traditional thinking (I mean one of the lead authors on the underlying papers was a human rights expert).
Yes, I agree with all of that (esp about adapting to the situation, finding a third way when the old options aren't working, etc- though the Bush administration took way too long, eventually I do feel that they did this on Iraq.) Also good points about the learning process in general and the usefulness of the strategic/tactical blueprint for future conflicts.
Oh, and oops, I just realized I wrote Zawahiri instead of Al Zarqawi above. Rather than edit I'll just note that I do know the difference but just typed the wrong name for some reason.