The Civil War has been coming up with some regularity in the news, and it occurs to me that I've never offered here my view of it, which is in some respects different than the standard view. I base this off of reading my way through my library's collection of Civil War books as a child, and a few years thinking about constitutions, civil war, and the rule of law during my academic career.

In a nutshell: the Civil War was 'about' constitutional issues, where slavery is the driving force behind those issues. Rather than deflecting or diminishing slavery as a cause, it amplifies the extent to which the South acted in bad faith. That is to say: the southern states seceded because they wanted to establish independent political control over their own territory and did not want to/in actuality recognize the authority of the United States federal government to do so. The reason they wished to have this control was to maintain slavery. But, taken as independent arguments, constitutional reasons alone served as a spectacular violation of the Rule of Law: the southern states were happy to leverage strong federal control when it suited their purposes, but once it no longer appeared that they would be able to dictate national policy, they picked up their ball and left rather than engage in the work of politics; they were so convinced that any defeat would have been so unjust that the prospect of facing one was intolerable. (I am of the belief that Lincoln would have been considerably more moderate on slavery had the South not radicalized the issue; the constitutional arguments may have been pretexts to the South, but they were nearly the whole of the point for Lincoln.) That is to say, the South was wrong on slavery, conveniently and deeply hypocritical on the Rule of Law, and--most offensive to a certain type of southern sympathizer--guilty of bad form.

One should probably also note that this bad faith tendency--"I might lose, and if I do, I will impugn the legitimacy of the people who disagree with me. In fact, I will pre-emptively impugn their legitimacy in the hope this will increase the chances of my side winning."--has unfortunately become one of the default modes of handling political and social disagreement.

I was never entirely sold on Obama, who seemed capable of giving good speeches but a little slippery on policy detail, but the Administration's response to the NSA stuff is, well, astounding. But at least we all know who to blame: George W Bush, whose tentacles of evil power are capable of extending forward five years after he left office. A diabolical genius, indeed, just as he's always been portrayed.

Either that, or a lot of people need to be rethinking their willingness to trust in the goodness of the people they elect.

Or, hey, third option: maybe civil liberties are less important than universal health care. Which is... a view, I guess, but probably not one that should be called 'liberal.'

Just Because You're... etc etc

There are bigger and more significant matters to consider about the NSA and the US government's habit of spying on its own citizens, but the role that the FBI played in Ernest Hemingway's mental breakdown and suicide is another black mark. His friend is upset that he didn't take the Hemingway's concerns seriously, but the whole matter could have been avoided if having contact with Cuba in the 1950s was not automatically a cause for concern.

A Thought on the Prop 8 Case and Ethical Obligations

In re: this ("The courts shouldn’t be foreclosed from hearing appeals just because the current government declines to defend a law") and this ("With today's decision, the Supreme Court is basically gutting the people's right to pass initiatives that elected officials don't like and then to defend them all the way to the highest court in the land"):

In college they told us about the dispute resolution triad--every civil or criminal case has two competing parties and someone tasked with resolving the conflict. On two ends, this is not a problem at all: the arbitrator will be convinced of the fairness of their ruling, and the winning side will be happy to have won. The problem of administering law is convincing the party that loses to accept the result. It does this in equal parts by claiming neutrality--considering the legal merits of each argument and not the people arguing--and the most vigorous possible defense of one's position. The lawyers are not expected to be neutral: their job is to produce the best possible result for their side. The system requires people to behave impersonally: there are roles, and the roles must be filled. A criminal defense lawyer who tanks a case because they believe their client to be guilty has committed an ethical violation, even if the person is in fact guilty and the punishment they receive is wholly deserved.

The problem with the Prop 8 case is that the state failed its ethical duty to its citizens. The court was right to hold that the petitioners lacked standing--it's hard to see how it could be granted here and not to many, many other petitioners who had less of a case. I am not particularly interested in the merits of Prop 8 itself, nor in the referendum system that produced the law. The problem is that the state did not fulfill its prescribed role: to defend the laws independently of what it thinks of them. The state officials represent the people, who live in a state with referendum laws: if a referendum passes it's a law no less than one that goes through the state legislature. It's not the place of the state to decide which laws it wants to defend in court or anywhere else: if the rule of law holds up as an idea, it needs to apply equally and all the time. Just like the ethics of the lawyers actions are independent of the guilt of their client, the actions of the state in judicially defending the law should be the same regardless of the wisdom of the law (after all, the court can always strike the law down on its merits).

The most interesting implication of this would be a countering view that contends that state officials can and do make discretionary choices all the time about when to apply, enforce, and prosecute under certain laws (and much Supreme Court hay has been made from these: Griswold and Lawrence come to mind). But this seems to prove what a work-to-rule strike proves: that the collection of laws we have is too vast and complex to be enforced as written. Unresolved is the question of why this state of affairs should be considered desirable.

Democracy is about feelings, y'all, and not procedural regularity.

I mean: the law was dumb, as are Texas' filibuster rules. But:

1. The action of crowds attempting to hold up a vote might (depending on circumstances) be democratic, but it's also not even remotely liberal. (Imagine the sides being reversed, and see how you'd feel about it. If you'd feel exactly the opposite, it's not a good political model.)

2. Thinking that politics is good or right when you get the emotional rush of a victory is not good. The entire point of politics (and law) is that sometimes you lose, and that's okay, because you want the other side to respect the outcome when you win.

Thoughts on Syria: at the moment, it looks more like Clinton bombing the Sudan in 1998 than Iraq III.

If the question is strictly one of justice, then some kind of intervention is demanded, if we have some capability to prevent the worst abuses of the Syrian government (and the rebels). That part's not a complicated question. What the 'some kind of intervention' is will be.

I have gradually come to oppose these types of actions, in spite of the moral clarity of the case. The problem is that most of the western world, and the United States in particular, is unprepared or unwilling to stomach the realities of intervention. Successful interventions take a lot of time--decades, not months or years; they require serious and sustained involvement--the good of the people you seek to help has to become, in some way, your good. As Tocqueville noted, though, the characteristic of America is an inability to focus on a problem for long enough to actually solve it. If it will be an issue of concern for, at best, a few months, then it's better to avoid acting.

But this is a particular type of objection, not at all different from refusing to permit a civil rights march because it might incite violence. That is to say: it is entirely up to the general public to decide what is important to it. While it may, pragmatically and in the moment, make sense to concede to the reality of the political situation, we should be aware that the entire system functions only because of a fundamental decision to be unjust. American interventions don't work because the American people don't care about the rest of the world (this is not a problem unique to America, though we are its apotheosis); it is their own intransigence that sabotages the action, not the wrongness or impracticality of the action itself.

I used to know some people who worked at the NSA, and while they did seem slightly more authority-acceptant than the average person, they did not seem otherwise unusual. But that's the banality of evil for you.

Actual question: is it morally defensible to work on programs like PRISM, or is one bound to decline the offer or quit rather than accept such a posting?

First thought: it might be analogous to being a defense attorney, whose job is to do the best lawyering possible regardless of one's personal feelings for the client. That's a morally defensible position to uphold, since the premise of all trials is the balancing of two antagonistic interests. But it's unclear how it would map on to this case. Non-nationals who are suspected of real or potential crimes is an instance where vigorous spying does function symmetrically, since one assumes the intentions of such people are hostile and they are actively seeking to avoid detection. American citizens, or non-citizens who are not planning to engage in any such actions have no reason to suspect their actions and behaviors might require protection.

On balance, the better analogy is to guerilla/partisan warfare or (heh) terrorism: the guerilla or partisan derives their entire strategic advantage from looking exactly like everyone else. They trade on the unwillingness of uniformed soldiers to randomly attack or harass those who look like civilians. The guerilla cheats the laws of war by not being willing to fight openly (to be sure, this doesn't mean a partisan or guerilla cause might be unjust, only that insomuch as it does this it violates the developed ethics of fighting war--jus in bello is not jus ad bellum). So also with the NSA. It requires the fact that it doesn't look like it's doing anything at all to provide cover for the things it does, and relies, crucially, on the inability of the average person to act as they would if they knew they were subject to monitoring.

The jus in bello/jus ad bellum distinction is quite useful: the means used to fight for a cause can be unethical, wrong, or evil, even if the cause itself is worth fighting. This is a commonsense observation: we have police to prevent and fight crime, but this doesn't mean the police get to do whatever they want. One would have to conclude the same here, that to engage in untargeted spying is wrong, full stop, especially of those who have committed no crime in the first place. One would be morally bound to refuse such an assignment. Which, I guess, leaves us to hope there are a lot more Edward Snowdens out there.

I interrupt my blogging silence to comment on five small matters pertaining to Boston, and specifically the arguments made here:

1. "For the area around Watertown, the advisory is primarily for the purposes of public safety. There is apparently a dangerous suspect in the area who had hours earlier engaged in a massive shootout with police that included the use of pipe bombs, and there are reports of possible explosive devices at various places in the neighborhood."

Here's the detail that seems to be overlooked: this guy, assuming he's the guy, was both well-armed and had explosives, and had several days in which he could have used either or both because no one knew who he was. He didn't become further violent until he encountered the police. I'm not blaming the police for being cautious, but this guy had already missed his chance to maximize his damage, and that led me to suspect it wasn't his primary goal.

2. "On the propriety side, I’ve seen many people, mostly on the right, compare the “Shelter in Place” advisory to Martial Law, but that analogy only works if you forget that it’s called an advisory and not an order, and if residents who decided not to stay home ended up getting arrested or otherwise detained by the police."

The analytic distinction between advisory and order, while valid, is wiped out by the circumstances and the people giving the advisory. If you've been a teacher (or professor), or ever dealt with a small child, or, for that matter, a pet who responds to commands, you should be intimately familiar with the fact that you can advise things you have neither the power nor the ability to enforce, but suggest them in such a way that they appear to have all that power and force behind them. An advisory, given by one who has authority, can easily be made to sound like an order without being an order. What's more, people in authority know this, and work to finesse the distinction if it will serve their interests. I mean, if the people who worked at Dunkin Donuts could stay open, there was literally no reason everyone else shouldn't have felt comfortable going about their day.

3. There was absolutely no reason for the lockdown; many large cities have undergone significant terrorist attacks without shutting down. Also: the lockdown accomplished nothing, since the suspect was found by a regular guy after he left his house, and not by any of those policemen going door-to-door. What the lockdown did succeed in doing was poisoning the well of public spirit by making people think that criminal (there's absolutely no reason at the moment to think of it as terroristic) behavior warrants a massive reaction by the state, especially when (details pending) the flight and lockdown seems to have been inspired by a gunfight with the police in which they somehow managed to lose one of the two people they were looking for. That is, their inability to do their job becomes a license to grant them more powers.

4. Twitter was filled last night with Tocqueville-predicted American self-congratulation* that this guy was taken alive and would be read his Miranda rights, which, whoops. But at least this is an exception to the general rule, and not something the Administration usually condones, which also whoops. There should be room to say that threats are real and must be taken seriously, but that in higher-stakes situations it is important to keep the rule of law and protection of constitutional rights and liberties; both Republicans and Democrats seem equally unable to manage this.

5. The amount of action legitimated on the idea that 'no one knows' what the situation happens to be is truly staggering.


*I have come to recognize this as Tocqueville's central insight: there is no situation in which Americans are not able to find something to praise in their own conduct. People run to help after the bomb blasts? Sure. Doctors work to save lives? Sure. Everyone keeps calm about it? Sure. Bostonians voluntarily stay home to let the police do their thing? Why not. Everyone watches it obsessively on tv? We're a united country, you know. Miranda rights? Absolutely. Etc etc. Even if some of the things we take pride in are not objectively sources of pride; even if we contradict ourselves from earlier. No matter.

Agreed:

In an Atlantic Wire post titled "It's Time We Talked About Gun Control," my sharp colleague Jen Doll writes, "We're going to have to talk about this; we're going to have to form coherent thoughts; and we're going to have to stop simply cleaving to our agendas and our selfish little opinions of what we want and what we think we should have -- and when 'the right time is' -- if this is ever going to get any better." But that isn't a call for a conversation! It's an assertion that opponents of gun control are selfish, and that they (not "we") are going to "have to" change their minds. It's fine to make that argument. The problem is couching it as a mere call for talking, when it is in fact an assertion that the only reasonable conclusion is that the other guys are wrong.

This sort of advice-giving shows up all the time, and it is annoying every time it does. It showed up after the election in endless "the way for Republicans to win elections is to adopt Democratic positions on all issues" articles, in insistences that religious citizens not appeal to their religious beliefs in order to justify policies, in arguments for and against abortion that require one side to accept the premises of the other side before conversation can happen.

On The Hairpin a month or so ago, in an "Ask a Married Dude" column (which I cannot find at the moment), there was a question from a woman who wanted to know how to get her occasionally non-compliant boyfriend to agree to have conversations every time (she perceived) something to have gone wrong; it's not that they weren't resolving issues as they came up, it's just that she wanted more communication. The Married Dude interpreted this, in part, as frustration on the letter-writers part that she wasn't winning these arguments every time (the "I am moderate and reasonable and he is not" element was present in the letter), and the apparently-neutral desire for more communication was a means of attempting to get the boyfriend onto ground where he would be more likely to lose. The catch being, as Married Dude realized, that this is a really terrible way to resolve things even if the letter-writer really was more reasonable every time. If you want things to be healthy, arguments have to be won in a fair and legitimate manner, which means accepting the possibility that one will lose sometimes even if one has the stronger argument. People are not bottomlessly reasonable, and a certain amount of go-along-to-get-along has to be part of the deal.

As with relationships, so also with politics: no one gets everything they want, everyone has to compromise, even on issues they deem essential. If it's not a central issue of justice, or one that brings the legitimacy of the whole system into question, sometimes you just lose, and have to accept that.

Some thoughts on gun control and related matters*:

When I was in grad school, I once had the idea for a paper whose title would be "Easy Cases Make Bad Law." The idea came to me when putting together a term paper on the formation of the law for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Despite public perception, Nuremberg is generally considered a one-off in international criminal law, establishing few or no precedents binding on any subsequent courts, for the simple reason that the law was put together in a notably shoddy manner, punting on some questions of procedure and violating basic understandings of criminal law. It seemed obvious to me at the time (and having now taught the IMT a couple times, still seems obvious) that this procedural irregularity was entirely a feature of the rush to set up the court: Nazi leaders had to be tried right away, and it was obvious that most of them were guilty (of what exactly, in legal terms, was never clear), and so any institutional arrangement that worked quickly and produced the correct trial outcome would be accepted, no matter what other problems it may have had.

A discussion of this case would provide the launching pad for a more general discussion of law formation. Policy options often seem very clear, but law is an intensely messy procedure even in the best of circumstances. A law needs to have a good fit to the problem it is meant to address: it needs to be general, linking up as many relevant things in a class as there might be. But it also needs to be minimally tailored, doing the least amount that will be effective; it needs to be aware of negative externalities that all laws will impose because they aim to change behavior and that change cannot be predicted very well; it needs to recognize that laws are enforced by people with all their varied mental and emotional states, that organizations and laws have a way of building a logic that sustains their own existence, even if that logic bears little resemblance to the reasons for law in the first place.

Two additional, smaller considerations, on rights, and on the limits of law. On rights: the purpose of having a right to something means to recognize that we have to hold to it even when it would be easier, or more convenient, or safer, to put the right aside. One doesn't have to believe that rights are absolute trumps, but just that safety, expedience, or other quite-important considerations are things we accept rather than a loss of rights. If sufficient emergency justifies the suspension or revocation of rights, then they are not properly called rights: they're just nice policy things we'd like to have sometimes. The related point is that a system of law and government, no matter how coercive, is not going to be able to stop all violence, all risk, or all uncertainty. There will always be some.

Gun violence is a funny case because it illustrates so well how poor human beings are at estimating the odds of low-frequency events: mass shootings have a (slightly higher, still low) frequency even as gun violence and crime decline on the whole. But then, there are still people who think of cities as fantastically violent places even though you're better off in Manhattan, or Chicago, or LA now than 10 or 20 years ago. So also the general preference for driving to flying, even though the former is significantly more dangerous (a few months driving in Chicago have begun to change my own mental calculations on this point). One's feeling less safe has very little connection to whether or not one is objectively more safe. So feelings, however strong, will only get so far.

Alright, to the point: the problem with gun control laws is trying to build a general law out of the feeling of "this sort of thing can't happen." The suggested changes in law bear very little relationship to the enabling factors of the crime in question: what law is going to stop someone from taking the legally-owned weapon of someone else?

But more than this: the initial burst of "we have to do something" gets problematic when specifying the exact nature of the changes to gun policy that need to happen: the law can't be a list of generally-phrased items with a tapering "etc." at the end: it's a list of definite changes that have to happen. But the conviction that law needs to regulate guns isn't going to tell, for example, what specific number of rounds a clip should be limited to. 10? 15? 30? What's the principle on which that decision is going to be made? Is it possible to specify in any concrete way what would and wouldn't be possible with one number rather than another? If the answer to the difficulty here is just to ban guns (or a class thereof) outright, then it seems an admission that the actual difficulties is sculpting policy are too difficult and therefore it's better to avoid these questions entirely. But that, it seems, is problematic in its own way: I can't think of anyone who would accept this as a general governmental approach to social problems.

The reality is, I think, more difficult and less comforting: the death of anyone is a tragedy, all the more so when the means are violent and unnecessary. But the causes are complex, and many, and hiding behind it all is that tendency in human nature that makes the eradication of all violence impossible. To address all aspects of that problem head-on would require constant attention and action on the part of everyone and (as, for example, international criminal law tends to show) people don't like having that kind of responsibility. The difficulty of the solution doesn't change the problem.


*(A general note: people are not, generally, venial or stupid; people can be (and often are) mistaken, but we have a responsibility to take the views of others seriously; if you cannot imagine a serious circumstance under which people would hold a view opposed to your own, you have failed in your responsibility as a democratic citizen.)

I'm no expert, but I think belittling someone for their stupidity when they have expressed interest in voting for your party is probably not a very smart move. If the Republicans are dismissive of College Republicans, that's a problem.

(For the record: I don't like articles of the "the way for x party to win an election is for it to take over all the policies of y party" variety, but I think it'd be more useful to point out to a concerned young potential Republican that the exact same thing was happening to the Democrats in 2004, and they managed their way out of that problem; so also for Republicans in 1996 or 98). Maybe it changes the author's opinions, maybe it doesn't. But what seems to be missing is knowledge of historical context, and that knowledge is something that can be transmitted to the author in much less annoying of a form.)

(Also, in re: sophomoric. She's 1.5 (approximately) years into college and, if she's anything like most college students, doesn't write particularly well, objectively speaking: can't alter her writing style for the occasion, creaky on building arguments, etc. All of this is perfectly normal and says nothing at all about her underlying level of intelligence or the writing ability that she might come into. Faulting her for being perhaps 20 and not having the world as a whole figured out seems like a significant failure of charity.)

You will probably not be surprised to hear it, but I thought Ken from Popehat and Killer Grease basically got the election right.

Ken:

This time it's really different! For sure! There are certainly demographic and cultural shifts going on in this country, and they will have an electoral impact. But I beg you, try not to be one of those people who buy into the "this represents a fundamental shift in the American electorate" narratives. In my lifetime, I heard it in 1980 and 1984 and 1992 and 1994 and 2000 and 2006 and 2008 and 2010, when one party or the other found favor, and there was much talk of "permanent majorities" and the like. Take it with a grain of salt.

I'm teaching mostly first-years and, as it happens, my first year of college was also a presidential election year. This made me feel both nostalgic and sad: I have never cared about a presidential election as much as I did in 2000, but I also regard this as essential to my mental health and emotional maturity. Because it's good to have the experience of passionately caring about something transient, especially while you're young: your hopes inevitably get disappointed and you recognize that the permanent majority you were hoping for will never materialize and, in any event, there's always another election. But at 18 or 19 it's hard to see that politics is a realm in which it's difficult to impose your will, and so little good can happen (but a lot of bad certainly can).

As it happens, on Wednesday we were reading Book One of Augustine's On the Free Choice of the Will, and were talking about temporal law. The eternal law addresses and concerns the things that are always just, but it's of limited use for actual politics because human beings have will. We drew out the implications of the problem of free will: it means that, even when people know perfectly well what the right thing to do is, they can choose not to do it. Thus you need temporal law, which is a system that attempts to restrain the worst of the impulses that arise from free wills. In discussing this, I think the students began to get a sense of what makes politics tragic: that it's a losing and imperfect battle against people who you can't really control anyway. This is the big, important point to realize: there is no salvation in politics. If you can learn to not expect it, you can avoid falling prey to the temptation to overvalue it. And that is, so far as I can see, the beginning of political wisdom.

Vis-a-vis this, I overheard a conversation on campus yesterday which is, I think, rather typical. It went something like this (these were adult-type people):

Person 1: It's really frustrating that Obama isn't doing anything on immigration.
Person 2: Yeah, especially since it's the thing you work on and care most about.
Person 1: Yeah, but I guess he can't do everything.

...and it makes a good example of people who have issues they care about deeply who intentionally vote for candidates that don't care about those issues, or advocate for policies they don't support. This is the strange logic of having to choose between two pre-approved candidates, and considering that any attempt to, I don't know, vote for a candidate who supports the actual policies you believe in is 'wasting your vote.' This country. Sometimes I can't even.

Random election thoughts:

*By my estimation, this is the fourth Most Important Presidential Election of Our Time in a row (this is, n.b., all the elections I've been eligible to vote in), which suggests to me that perhaps the 'most important' designation is somewhat overused.

*I have enjoyed, as dark comedy, the way in which left and right have switched sides from the 2004 election and no one seems to have noticed (I particularly liked a "TOO BAD THE POPULAR VOTE DOESN'T MATTER" facebook post commenting on Romney's sometimes national polling advantage. 2000 is presumably different for some reason).

*Analogy time: the average American's relationship to politics seems not unlike the difference between dealing with a car salesman and an F&I officer when buying the car: the salesman's job is to assure you that everything with the car is the best that it could possibly be, and the F&I guy's job is to convince you that your car will immediately fall apart if you don't buy another $10,000 in additional warranty packages. In other words: half lulling you into complacency to ignore details, half convincing you the world's going to come to an end if you don't do what this guy tells you needs to be done.

*History time: there are a bunch of areas where it really doesn't matter who gets elected president (e.g.). I remember having a conversation with a very smart political scientist in early 2009 who couldn't quite understand why I was positive Obama wouldn't close down Guantanamo when the colleague was so certain he would (because he had promised to). The most positive spin that can be given to Obama's civil liberties record is that he's a wash compared to GWB; one could plausibly argue him to be worse; one could not plausibly argue him to be better. Nor would Romney be a step in the right direction, either. The fact is that the office of the president is one that accrues powers and never lets them go, promising instead to only use them for the right purposes ("the last guy made bad decisions, but I'll make good ones. Promise!"). No one's going to turn down more power if it's given to them, and no one's going to voluntarily relinquish it if they don't have to, or at least not anyone who gets nominated as a major-party candidate.

*Yesterday in class we discussed Aristotle's argument for keeping certain people out of governmental decision-making for lack of virtue. The idea is something like: people who are virtuous can connect their intended causes to intended effects--the ability to plan and follow through makes their actions deliberate and effective. But most people can't do that: they can only partially or haphazardly reflect in this way, and people who can only haphazardly do things are not the ones you want making political decisions. The class found this to be logical, as it indeed seems to me to be logical. And yet they rejected this as a basis for restricting the franchise or political decision-making in our own time (n.b. this does not constitute an endorsement of that position on my part). We're stuck with allowing irrational people to decide things, whatever the cost.

This seems as good an excuse as any ("Barack Obama's the only protestant [sic]* on the ballot") to point out how odd it seems to me that no one takes the president's religious self-description seriously: on the right for reasons that have been well-compassed, but on the left as well, where there seems to be a widespread perception that Obama is atheist/agnostic/none-of-the-above and just lying about it for electoral reasons. Which strikes me, first, as a case of wishful thinking, and secondly, of displaying the weirdness of American politics: the person who lies for the sake of being elected is somehow given a pass or valorized for doing so.


*About this. Protestant is the name of a group of people: it's a proper noun: it gets capitalized.** So also God when speaking about a god in particular, as opposed to generic deities. I get the point of the movement to de-emphasize treating these like proper nouns, but it comes of as churlishness or nonsense. I don't believe in the cult of the saints, but if a painting has "St." in its title, I include it. Acting otherwise invites absurdities like the following, which I saw a few days ago, "thank the good lord that..." It's a colloquialism. Capitalize it. Otherwise the sentence scans wrong and doesn't make any sense.

**As a similar case, "catholic": when lowercase, it's an adjective; when uppercase, it's the name of a religion. Which one gets used matters.

It's probably not that unusual, but it does seem a little strange that the way I get an absentee ballot in North Carolina is write a letter and ask them to send me one. And all this to just throw away my vote on a third-party candidate.* I have poorly learned the lessons of political science.


*(I was legitimately on the fence about this until the whole Conor Freidersdorf/LGM dust-up about protest voting. Obama seems incontrovertibly worse on civil liberties than GWB, not least his belief that he can extrajudicially order the killing of American citizens so long as he thinks really hard about it.** Not that Romney would be better on this score (though it's hard to imagine a man as flexible as he is would possess the self-belief needed to think that bad actions wouldn't taint his decision-making; he's Bobby Bowden to Obama's Joe Paterno), but I was narrowly convinced that the likely closeness of the race in North Carolina might mean that it made sense to vote strategically. But the LGM responses convinced me there's a real danger in thinking each person should consider their votes decisive and each election a crisis in which the world will fall apart with the wrong vote: sometimes you have to think in the longer term.)

** There may be some future politics-and-ethics class where we consider whether Obama might be the politician with dirty hands from Walzer's "Political Action" article. I suspect not: the politician there must believe that their action is wrong, but do it anyway. But it'd be interesting to discuss.

Conor Friedersdorf write an article in which he says Obama's track record on civil liberties is so poor that he can't bring himself to vote for him. This is read at Lawyers, Guns and Money as white person privilege, which is ironic, since the identifying factor of said privilege is over-concern for the people of Pakistan who have to live under the threat of drone strikes. Perhaps concern of a condescending nature would qualify as White Person Privilege, though one has to imagine that it would be difficult to separate from actual, non-condescending concern for the same people. The same article is then later analogized to the experience of a person who was so mad about welfare reform that they voted for Nader and not Gore, which, even though that vote made absolutely no difference in the outcome of the 2000 election, then becomes a source of regret and a point in favor of no one ever issuing a protest vote for any reason.

The author also seems unaware of the disanalogy between their case and the one Friedersdorf offers, which is not surprising because it doesn't focus on the strongest part of his case: not the drone strikes, but the 'kill list':

Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama's kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done.

The difference between "enacted perfectly constitutional policy I don't like which had negative repercussions on a lot of people" and "enacted unconstitutional policy that fundamentally subverts much of the rule of law and which the president doesn't appear to think is a problem because he's a good guy and won't use it for bad purposes" is one of kind, not degree, and to elide the difference between the two is to blur the boundary between legitimate policy differences, however fundamental, and abuses of power that are unacceptable no matter who engages in them.

And, heck, I'm not even going to say that given that, one shouldn't vote for Obama. If you think he's the best option, vote for him. But just be clear on the nature of the things he's doing.

This is not an analogy:

One of the things I found strangest in the aftermath of Michigan football's loss to Alabama is that the person who came in for the most criticism was Rich Rodriguez, a.k.a. the guy who has not been Michigan's football coach for 18 months. It's the fact that he recruited not-very-good players, you see, that prevented Michigan from competing well, and not any problem on the part of the present coaches. By contrast, Rodriguez deserved none of the credit for last year's team going 11-2, and his attempts to claim that the team would have done similarly well had he still been coach were met with derision, because obviously that team's successful record was attributable to the current coaching staff. How Hoke can get the credit for 2011 but none of the blame when things go wrong in 2012 is truly baffling, but that's fandom for you.

(Actually not an analogy: I do think the coaching level has improved, but Michigan fans have just hit the period in which it becomes obvious their coaches are just very good, and not geniuses. They cannot, by and large, admit this to themselves right now (preferred coping technique: "I'm just waiting for 2014/2015, then we'll be awesome"), but they've realized it.)

So, the claim here about freedom of religion and international law/human rights is incorrect, and points out something that has troubled me about the recent concern over freedom of religion:

..Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

That’s unequivocal. Freedom of religion means the right to live according to one’s own faith, that is, to “manifest” our religion or belief in practice, both “in public or private,” without interference from the state.

Article 18 definitely says that, and it is certainly absolute. It is also not legally binding, part of the reason it is able to be absolute. The very critically different language in the legally-binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching. 
2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.
3. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.
4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

Paragraph 3 clearly envisions that freedom of religion does not serve as a end-all trump against claims by the state. It is not surprising that it does so, since some of the rights in the ICCPR are qualified in this way, and all the rights in the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are qualified under Article 2(1). The question is then whether a particular law enacts a policy that is "necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others." It does no good, in this case, to assert 'freedom of religion' as a defense against a law that seeks to abridge religious freedom, because the question is not whether there can be an abridgement (there can) but whether the abridgement can be justified on the grounds given.

(Via Alan Jacobs, who I imagine might disagree with my point.)

Complete agreement with Ken from Popehat about the right not to be criticized. I always found it strange that people on the right (with whom I have had more experience) would insist simultaneously that their beliefs were the only natural, logical, rational position, and that their positions were under constant and unscrupulous attack from people unwilling to play by the rules. If the positions are logical, and the attacks are unscrupulous, there's nothing to worry about; if you're worried the attacks will convince people who would otherwise agree with you, that's a comment on the opposition's arguments (which may have more rationality than they are otherwise credited for) or the audience, whom you don't trust to sort the good arguments from the bad. But the combination of insisting on the immutable rightness of your beliefs and the unfairness of people who disagree with you is an unflattering kind of special pleading.