The Decisionist

Matt Damon and Arne Duncan and Jonathan Chait

Chait is smart — he has a degree from the University of Michigan! — but he is also way into “ed reform”. So naturally he finds Matt Damon annoying. But here is today’s reason why.

According to two people familiar with the efforts, the administration tried to arrange a meeting with Damon and government officials, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, before the July 30 march. The sources declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

In fact, Duncan was willing to meet Damon at the airport when he flew into the Washington region and talk to him on the drive into the city, according to the sources. Damon declined all of the requests.

Chait is mad because Damon (supposedly) did not want to meet with Duncan about something. We don’t know if the story is true, and we don’t know why Duncan wanted to meet with Damon, and we don’t know why Damon didn’t want to meet with Duncan (if he didn’t), but — whatever — Damon is against “ed reform”, he was going to speak at a rally against it, so he had an obligation to meet with the Secretary of Education.

I don’t know that this follows, but here is what Chait says:

If Damon knows enough about education policy to speak at a rally, then he knows enough to take a meeting with Arne Duncan and debate it. Getting a chance to make your case to policy makers is what political activists are supposed to want. That’s the goal. If Damon feels he doesn’t know enough about the issue to survive a meeting with Duncan with his convictions intact, then he has no business speaking at a rally.

Here’s where I’m thinking maybe Chait hasn’t been to so many rallies. A rally is not like a policy summit. Larry Summers isn’t there, they don’t circulate white papers, it’s not in Jackson Hole. Anyone can speak at a rally (though it helps if you are good at speaking in public). More generally: you don’t need to be able to “survive a meeting” with a policymaker to be entitled to an opinion about this kind of thing. “Ed reform” isn’t an engineering problem: there are principles at stake. For example: the principle of academic freedom. Or the principle that a decent education is not one thing for rich people and another thing for poor people. It’s like: did you even see Good Will Hunting?

— Anti-Cato

Can Michele Bachmann win?

Jonathan Chait thinks so.

He is wrong, obviously. The question is why this sort of speculation seems interesting to political writers like him and Ed Kilgore. It’s not that they need to have no political views; Chait, for example, is free to express his moderately progressive militant Zionism on an hourly basis. Is it just lingering dislike of Mitt Romney?

Well, it is that. (Not that there’s anything wrong with disliking Romney.) But I think there’s a deeper reason too: a sense that political outcomes should not be decided well in advance of elections. And I agree, they shouldn’t. But — they are.

— Anti-Cato

How Republicans win elections

Jonathan Chait makes an important observation:

Most people have the default assumption that the two parties are essentially mirror images of each other. But there are a lot of asymmetries between the Democratic and Republican parties that result in non-parallel behavior. The Republicans have a fairly unified economic base consisting of business and high-income individuals, whereas Democrats balance between business, labor, and environmental groups. The Republican Party reflects the ideology of movement conservatism, while the Democratic Party is a balance between progressives and moderates.

The upshot is that the Democratic Party is far more dependent upon the votes of moderates, who think of themselves in non-ideological terms and want their leaders to compromise and act pragmatically. The reason you see greater levels of partisan discipline and simple will to power in the GOP is that it has a coherent voting base willing to support aggressive, partisan behavior and Democrats don’t.

I agree with all of this. Still, you might wonder how Republicans can win elections at all, since — though there are a lot of conservatives in the US — the majority of voters aren’t movementarians. Democrats depend on so-called moderate voters to win elections — but so do Republicans!

The answer, I think, has to do with an anti-political strain in American politics. Voters who vacillate between the two parties are not well-informed persons of moderate political inclinations; by now, nearly all these people are Democrats. They are uninformed persons of no political inclination: they regard the difference between the two parties as a matter of institutional rather than ideological competition. (That is why “partisan bickering” is so unfathomable to them: they can’t see what the “bickering” is about.) They will vote Republican rather than Democrat the way other people buy Coke rather than Pepsi.

What this shows is that it is not just sociopathic libertarian Jesusism that is the enemy: but the failure of a large proportion of Americans to notice it.

— Anti-Cato

Two steps toward a higher-status occupation

From Jonathan Chait’s most recent TRB (subscription required):

Transforming education from a low-risk civil service job into a high-reward, high-status occupation requires both doing away with tenure and creating the political will to pump money into a system that deserves to have money pumped into it.

I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that the constant possibility of summary termination by middle managers for arbitrary reasons generally lowers the status of an occupation. But I agree with the money pumping part.

— Anti-Cato

Nothing is over — Updated

Ezra Klein reports something supposed leftists have been saying:

[T]he era of big government liberalism [is over]… [F]uture public policy has to be about ways to maximize sustainable economic growth, and ways to maximize the efficiency with which services are delivered.

This is depressing. After the Bastille, the barricades, Harper’s Ferry, Jim Crow, Vietnam — the left must now devote everything to the cause of sustainable growth.

Presumably the excitement is all in the sustainability, which is to include constraints on environmental despoliation, educational standards, financial regulation, monetary policy and so forth. These are fine things, but I think it’s worth pointing out they don’t follow from the idea of sustainable growth. It appears the economy can grow in ways we would call sustainable even as it becomes more and more unequal. In particular, it can grow without adding jobs. Or it can grow while adding only low-paying jobs. I am not denying, of course, that sustainable economic growth is a condition of the society we want to live in. But as a fundamental goal, it may not even be compatible with social justice.

Health care reform was a small victory for us. But nothing is over. In case that was not obvious, here are a few examples of things that are not over.

• Higher education is available to far too few Americans; and far too few Americans are prepared for it.
• About ten times too many Americans are in prison.
• The distribution of wealth in America is desperately unequal, and worsening all the time.
• The right of American labor to organize is in serious jeopardy.
• It costs too much for ordinary Americans to run for public office.
• Corporate lobbies and special interests run Washington, DC.
• American foreign policy continually perpetrates gross violations of international law and standards.
• 10 percent of Americans (by the most conservative estimate) are unemployed.

Probably I forgot some.

— Anti-Cato

Update: Mike Konczal makes a similar point, with special emphasis on higher education and organized labor.

Paul Ryan may not be a philosopher

Jonathan Chait is worried about Rep. Paul Ryan’s devotion to Ayn Rand — and points out creepy things he has said, such as that

The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.

Chait is right that Rand is creepy; but I have to wonder how well Ryan could have understood her, if he found a “public service” message in Atlas Shrugged.

— Anti-Cato