Democracy in America

JUST when I thought it had gone full circle, it went another full circle. It was crazy enough when, as Jane Mayer and others have documented, the CIA took the manuals developed by military trainers for hardening soldiers against the kinds of torture and psychological-manipulation techniques that had been used on Americans by North Korean and North Vietnamese interrogators, reverse-engineered those techniques, and started using them on captives at Bhagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Then, when John McCain, who had himself been subjected to those torture and psychological-manipulation techniques in a Vietnamese prison camp, went ahead and endorsed their use by CIA interrogators, I thought the irony could go no deeper.

Never underestimate the American military! Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings scores another coup:

The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in "psychological operations" to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war, Rolling Stone has learned – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators.

The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as "information operations" at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.

Among the senators subjected to psy-ops manipulation by his own army: John McCain. I can't think of a funny closing line that could possibly top the straight-up Hollywood madness of this, so I'll just have to go with Mr Hastings's own serious observation, which is that the use of psy-ops techniques on American legislators shows the army is pretty desperate to convince people the war in Afghanistan is going swimmingly. Briefly, before the psy-ops guys get to my brain and zap my memory and logic cells, it isn't.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS cites Alan Taylor's "American Colonies: The Settling of North America" on how French-Iroquois warfare tacitly served both groups by erecting a protectionist barrier between northern Indians in Quebec and the Dutch colony at Fort Orange (now Albany)...

Because the northern Indians possessed better furs, they would, in the event of peace, become the preferred clients and customers of the Dutch, to the detriment of the Iroquois. As inferior suppliers of furs, the Iroquois had a perverse common interest with the French, an inferior source of manufactured goods. They both tacitly worked to keep apart the best suppliers of furs (the northern Indians) and of manufactures (the Dutch).

...and quips: "And today France is a rich country thanks to all the good middle-class jobs this Iroquois protectionism helped save."

From the NRC Handelsblad, "Ignoring History in the Westerschelde Debate":

The fall of Antwerp in 1585 and the Dutch blockade of the Scheldt [pictured above] were a pivotal moment for the separation of North and South, of the Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. Antwerp was cut off from the sea; Amsterdam took over Antwerp's dominant position. After the 1648 Peace of Münster the Dutch Republic managed to perpetuate the Scheldt blockade. It wasn't until the Treaty of London of 1839, in which the great powers agreed to the independence of Belgium, that the reopening of the Scheldt river was finally guaranteed.

Is Amsterdam a rich city today thanks to all the good middle-class jobs this Dutch protectionism helped save? In part, yeah, to the extent that any modern economic circumstances can be traced to things that happened centuries ago. The Dutch blockaded Antwerp for over 200 years, from 1585 until the Netherlands became the Napoleon-aligned Batavian Republic in 1795. That may not be the primary reason why the Dutch manufactures available at Fort Orange were so cheap, but it's not unrelated, and it's certainly a major reason why Amsterdam was a thriving world commercial centre in the mid-1600s while Antwerp became a declining provincial town. If the French had wanted to justify protectionist behaviour in North America by arguing that the Dutch did it too, they would have been right.

This isn't to say that it's a good idea to ratchet up levels of protectionism when, as now, overall barriers to trade are low and declining. But when everyone's doing it, it's probably true that the people who do it more effectively are benefiting from it.

SCOTT LEMIEUX passes along a pretty useful point to keep in mind, courtesy of his friend Ken Sherrill.

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:

South Carolina – 50th
North Carolina – 49th
Georgia – 48th
Texas – 47th
Virginia – 44th

If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.

As Mr Lemieux says, this doesn't show that collective bargaining makes school systems better. But it makes it pretty hard to argue the converse.

On a broader note, I think this is illustrative of the need for people who are interested in better outcomes for national social challenges to stop arguing that their opponents are illegitimate and should be annihilated. In the particular case of unions, it's pretty clear from all the research that the existence of unions in a workplace can either increase or decrease productivity, depending on how unions and management interact. Conservatives who want to argue that unions destroy productivity almost inevitably use the example of the American auto industry and the UAW, which is an interesting example because American car manufacturers were defeated on quality and price by car manufacturers from two countries with extremely high rates of unionisation, Germany and Japan. When GM staged a last-ditch effort in the 1980s to learn how to make cars the Japanese way, they sent management and union teams to work with Toyota to see how to arrange collaborative union-management relationships.

There are clearly some serious problems facing American governance, and public-sector unions are going to have to make adjustments to solve those problems, whether it means pension restructuring or allowing the firing of incompetent teachers. But those kinds of reforms will be unachievable if unions correctly understand that their opponents, including Scott Walker and the modern Republican Party, are not in fact interested in collaborating with them on solutions, and are instead trying to destroy their existence as institutions.

EZRA KLEIN attempts to blur the distinction between public- and private-sector unions. Indeed, the title of his post, "You can't separate public and private unions", suggests that there is no distinction. But of course there is. The difference is profound, and goes to the very heart of liberal political theory.

As Max Weber taught, the state is an institution distinguished by its claim to a "monopoly on the legitimate use of violence". The principal task of political philosophy is to give an account of the conditions under which it is morally legitimate or justified for an exclusive group of people to get things done by threatening and applying coercion to the rest of the inhabitants of a certain territory. On the dominant liberal account, several things need to be true before some small subset of a population can be justified in pushing the rest of us around. First, it needs to solve a problem to which there is no voluntary or non-coercive solution. According to the standard story, only the artful application of credible threats of violence can deliver certain "public goods" without which we would all be worse off. This is, by and large, what the state is for. Of course, any state powerful enough to deliver the public goods and protect our rights is powerful enough to violate them. We each have ample reason to reject the authority of any state that does not rely on the oversight and authorisation of those of us at the business end of police batons. The government of the state must take a form that minimises the chances of the abuse of state violence. According to both liberal theory and history, some form of representative democracy seems to be the ticket.

While the liberal-democratic state has proven better than the known alternatives, it creates a number of serious problems on the way to solving others. Among the greatest of these problems is maintaining a system of public finance that does not stray outside the bounds of liberal legitimacy. The power to tax and spend is necessary for the performance of the democratic state's legitimate functions, but it is also a ready tool of exploitation and distributive injustice. An ideally legitimate state does nothing people can do better on voluntary terms, and it takes no more from people in taxes than is necessary to finance necessary public goods. But this is a moral target we never hit because the strategic logic of redistributive democracy reliably errs in the direction of expansion of services, deficit spending, and the abuse of taxpayers and other not-very-organised constituencies at the hands of highly-organised special interests. If we are concerned to minimise exploitation—if we care about the extent to which state violence is public-spirited and not merely criminal—we must go out of our way to acknowledge and guard against the abuses of fiscal democracy.

It is in the context of these concerns that we must consider the function of public-sector unions. If they do anything at all, it is to protect their members' claims on future government revenue from democratic discretion—to limit the power of the elected representatives of the democratic public to set the terms on which union-members will receive transfers from taxpayers. That these transfers come to workers in the form of compensation for services rendered the government seems to confuse a lot people. This is, I think, why people on both sides of the debate are distracted by the question of whether government workers are or are not "overpaid". To my mind, the real question is whether government workers should be granted special legal powers that (a) are unavailable to other groups whose welfare also turns on transfers from the treasury, or on the size of compulsory transfers from their bank accounts to the treasury, and (b) limit democratic sovereignty over the distribution of the burdens and benefits of the system of public finance.

I would argue on liberal grounds that justice demands limits on democratic sovereignty over budgetary matters precisely to avoid the exploitative redistribution that otherwise occurs. That's why I support constitutionalising nondiscrimination requirements on fiscal policy, among other reforms. My principled objection to public-sector unions is that their powers limit democratic sovereignty over taxation and public spending in a way that advantages some citizens at the expence of others—in a way that makes fiscal exploitation more, not less likely. Should they have grievances about their cut of the public budget, non-unionised government employees have recourse to the exact same democratic institutions as do other groups of citizens, which is as it should be. If we cannot trust democratic bodies to treat government workers fairly, then we cannot trust democratic bodies generally.

Anyway, whether or not you agree with me, this particular set of political issues simply does not arise in discussions of private-sector unions. The problem of bargaining over shares of the surplus from voluntary exchange between workers, capitalists, and consumers is a different problem. It's easy to separate private- and public-sector unions once you know how! Indeed, it's not only possible but reasonable to support private-sector unions as a safeguard against economic exploitation and oppose public-sector unions as an instrument of political exploitation. That would not be the possible, much less reasonable, were Mr Klein correct about the inseparability of the two kinds of unions.

IN THE first three quarters of 2010, Chevron earned $13.73 billion in profits. A substantial portion of those profits came from oil drilled in the Gulf of Mexico. Other profits came from oil drilled on private land. If Chevron drills oil on private land, it has to pay royalties to the owners of the land for the right to drill there. Normally, when Chevron drills oil on public land, it would pay royalties to the government, ie the taxpayer. But when Chevron drills oil on certain deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico, it doesn't have to pay royalties to anyone. That's because back in 1996, Congress decided it would be a good idea to encourage deepwater drilling by offering royalty-free leases in certain areas that wouldn't be otherwise commercially interesting.

Which is fine, if you believe in prolonging our addiction to fossil fuels; but that's another discussion. The main problem is that Congress obviously doesn't want to be handing out royalty-free drilling leases on sites that would be commercially attractive even at the going rate. That's just handing out taxpayer money to a few corporations for no good reason; among other things, it's not fair to other drillers who have to pay for their leases. And when the price of crude goes above a certain level, those tough-to-develop deepwater wells become commercially attractive even without the free leases. So Congress sensibly instructed the Minerals Management Service (MMS) to award these free leases only when the price of oil was at a level low enough that they wouldn't otherwise be profitable to exploit.

Whoops! We all remember the MMS, right? So apparently, in 1998-99, the folks at the MMS were too busy flirting with each other, or accepting private-jet rides to college football games, or whatever, to notice that the price of oil had gotten pretty high and they shouldn't be handing out free leases anymore. As a result, 24 companies got free leases they shouldn't have gotten. And ever since, they've been making extra money that they really ought to be returning in the form of leases on public property to the American taxpayer. As of 2008, the bill came to $1.3 billion; this year, the losses will be $1.5 billion. Over the decades-long lifetime of the wells it'll add up to a lot more. According to the Government Accountability Office it'll come to $53 billion over the next 25 years. Last week, representative Ed Markey and a few other Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee offered an amendment to the Republican budget bill to make those oil producers pay the standard amount in the future on the royalty-free leases they mistakenly received due to bureaucratic error. The amendment was voted down, 251-174.

If the oil companies were required to pay the royalties going forward which they should have been paying in the first place, the enormous profits they're currently booking would be slightly smaller. Oil-company shareholders would be a tiny bit less wealthy. The federal deficit would be a bit smaller too. Average taxpayers would have to pay slightly less interest on the national debt, and more of their taxes would thus be devoted to productive uses like maintaining the roads on which to drive the cars that burn the oil that the oil companies produce. A pointless multibillion-dollar distortion caused by bureaucratic error would be removed from the economy, and taxpayers would be funding a little bit less corporate welfare. There is no rationale for continuing to oblige regular taxpayers to pick up the tab for these distortionary favours to major oil companies except that the oil companies want the money. For this Congress, that's plenty reason enough.

Oh, one more thing. Some years back, Shell, BP, and two other oil companies that also mistakenly received royalty-free leases signed agreements with the federal government to voluntarily pay the normal lease on their wells from that date on. They probably did so less out of any concern for fairness to the American taxpayer than out of a desire to avoid the possibility that the government would try to retroactively recover leases for prior years. Nonetheless, voluntarily agreeing to pay the royalties going forward was the right thing to do. So, in the spirit of encouraging good behaviour: Shell and BP, good show. Chevron and the other guys, you need to go sit in the corner for a while and think about what behaviour this situation calls for.

(Photo credit: AFP)

MATTHEW YGLESIAS draws some insightful general lessons about unionism in America from his father's experience as a member and officer of the Writer's Guild of America. He concludes:

I think the classic postwar American dynamic of an economy with a large minority of the workforce unionized is fundamentally unstable. In the long-run the two equilibria are toward a non-union economy or else toward the Nordic model where virtually everyone is in a union. In the latter case, I think the unions become organizations of a more political character than anything else. In theory, Swedish labor unions could use their dominant labor market position to increase workers’ compensation by making Swedish firms less profitable than non-Swedish ones, but that would be bad for everyone. What you get instead is a kind of Mirror Universe version of the Chamber of Commerce, a politically powerful institution interested in maximizing the income growth of the median Swede rather than the median Swedish CEO.

I think this is a plausible broad-strokes picture. But what are we to infer from it? Left-leaning commentators pine constantly for the all-but-universal unionisation equilibrium, yet this seems no more likely to come to pass than the libertarian night-watchman state. There is no path from here to there. Both are pipe dreams.

Speaking of dreaming, one senses that progressive pulses have quickened lately due to the pro-union throng in Madison, as if success in persuading Wisconsin's duly elected democratic body to reverse course would somehow lead to some sort of cascade that ends in a revitalisation of unions as a political and economic force. But victory in salvaging for Wisconsin's state employees a package of legal-cum-political advantages over those with competing claims to state revenue seems to me to have approximately nothing to do with the prospects of private-sector unionism. And, of course, the sine qua non of the Wisconsin staredown is the unprecedented unpopularity of government-employee unions. Whatever the outcome in Madison, the fact that the whole thing is plausibly good politics for Governor Scott Walker bodes ill for those who dream of Sweden.

Which brings me to my question for progressives. Supposing that Mr Walker and not the SEIU is the vanguard of history—supposing that America is headed toward the stable non-union equilibrium—what is the next-best scenario from a progressive perspective? What is the answer if resurgent unionism is not? Is there one? I hear plenty of progressive rhetoric to the effect that only a rehabilitated union movement can save America from plutocracy and middle-class stagnation, but my sense is that this is a lot like conservative rhetoric to the effect that only a return to constitutional principles will save America from sclerotic socialist decline. Do progressives, like their conservative counterparts, really believe their own hype?

(Photo credit: AFP)

LAST week on Bill O'Reilly's show Karl Rove made a pseudo-laudable call for Republicans to distance themselves from birthers who believe, contrary to all evidence and the normal process of human day-to-day reasoning, that Barack Obama was born outside the United States. Of course Mr Rove didn't call for Republicans to do this because birtherism is wrong, paranoid, and tinged with nativist xenophobia and racial prejudice; he thinks they should do it in order to avoid Democratic "traps". Anyway, the subject of the discussion was the recent Public Policy Polling poll showing that 51% of likely Republican primary voters firmly believe that Mr Obama was born outside the United States. (Another 21% aren't sure.) That's up from 44% in August 2009. Here's the exchange:

ROVE: Republicans had better be clear about this.We had a problem in the 1950s with the John Birch Society, and it took Bill Buckley standing up as a strong conservative and taking them on.

Within our party, we've got to be very careful about allowing these people who are the birthers and the 9/11-deniers to get too high a profile and say too much without setting the record straight.

O'REILLY: What percentage of Republican voters—5%, 10%?

ROVE: I don't know, but whatever it is, it ought to be less, because we need the leaders of our party to say "Look, stop falling into the trap of the White House and focus on the real issues."

To believe that only 5% or 10% of Republican voters are birthers, you have to believe that the PPP poll is wildly off-base. Put it this way: say only 30% of GOP primary voters were birthers. And say GOP primary voters are just 10% of the electorate, like they were in 2008 (even though they were depressed that year and will be fired up in 2012, which should mean they'll constitute more of the electorate). That's 3% of the electorate. Now, as of mid-2010, the percentage of the electorate that self-identifies as "Republican" or "lean Republican" was 40%. So you're already at 7.5% of Republican voters, and you're assuming no Republicans at all believe that Mr Obama was born outside the United States, except for the ones who vote in primaries. Basically, what you have to think, and what Messrs O'Reilly and Rove do in fact think, is that the PPP poll is just somehow off by a huge factor; Mr Rove offhandedly says "look, this is a terrible poll," as if that claim needs no substantiation.

Predictably, Messrs O'Reilly and Rove's efforts to dismiss the results of the PPP poll were strongly denounced over the weekend, though not by angry political scientists defending the integrity of their profession.

Whether you agree or not, the people who are pushing the eligibility issue are on our side.  It is certainly counter-productive to deride them like liberals do. Recently a whole stream of Republicans have come out, at the prompting of the drive by media, to reassure us that Obama is a citizen and oh, yes, he is a Christian too...

The RINOs turn their noses up at the people who want the answers, which, incidentally is 60% of Republican voters. They turn their noses up at the Tea Party movement.  

Thus the inimitable prose stylings of Tea Party Nation. And, because it's just too good not to pass it on:

Yet, they do not take a moment to consider why this is important. If Barack Obama is proved to be ineligible to be President, everything he has done is wiped out.  Obamacare is gone.  The START treaty is gone.  The liberal lunatics Obama has appointed to the Federal Judiciary, including the two he has put on the Supreme Court are gone.

...What are the chances of success?  Who knows? Why do football teams run the flea flicker play?   It does not work all of the time, but when it does, the results are spectacular.  Why should conservatives all hope this works out?  Because this wipes out almost everything the Obama regime has done.  We get a do over.

We get a do over. Ay yay yay. You know, when I refer to this stuff in blog posts, people reliably tell me I shouldn't be paying attention to this kind of junk; it's nut-picking. I wish I could agree. This stuff is what's driving the American political conversation. This stuff is why, more likely than not, that PPP poll is accurate.

MAYBE social-networking sites can't topple dictators, but they can put up the money for a statue of RoboCop in downtrodden Detroit.

A little over a week ago, some guy from Massachusetts suggested via Twitter to Detroit's mayor that the city raise a monument to RoboCop, "a GREAT ambassador for Detroit." The cult-classic 1987 Peter Weller vehicle, you will recall, was set in a militarised, corporatist hellhole Detroit of the future. Detroit's Mayor, Dave Bing, politely brushed off the idea in a tweeted reply: "There are not any plans to erect a statue to RoboCop. Thank you for your suggestion." But the idea didn't then disappear for eternity into the unattended abyss of the municipal suggestion box. Once unleashed upon Twitter, savvy use of social media swiftly transformed an amusing suggestion into a concrete plan to put a RoboCop statue in the Motor City. A "Build a Statue of RoboCop in Detroit" Facebook page popped up, with a campaign on Kickstarter to "crowd-source" the funds to create the statue quick on its heels. Within days, the Kickstarter campaign shattered its $50,000 goal, and plans are afoot to situate a metal replica of the iconic half-man, half-death-machine constable in Detroit's Roosevelt Park, across from the picturesque decay of Michigan Central Station.

It's easy to imagine why Detroit's powers-that-be might wish to distance themselves from a famous cinematic symbol of Detroit as a violent, crumbling dystopia. Indeed, a "crowd-sourced" $50,000 RoboCop statue may seem like a cruel practical joke played on the struggling city by heartless nerds. However, it's possible to imagine how the project may seem to some as a glimmer of hope. If Detroit's going to make a comeback, it will need a lot of this sort of bottom-up initiative and energy. If a cast-iron monument to RoboCop suggests resignation to Detroit's decline, it also suggests the playful will to keep Detroit alive as an object of imagination, and in imagination there is hope. Plus, tourists! That's all nice. But for now I suspect that here in the USA the coordinating functions of social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Kickstarter will be deployed more for the amusement of well-wired geeks than for initiatives that will actually help those suffering in hard-knock cities like Detroit.

I HAVE spent large parts of today and yesterday sorting out visa issues at the giant federal monolith in downtown Manhattan. As government buildings go, it is not so bad. The waiting room of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is large, new and well-lit; big flat screens everywhere display the state of the queue, and as tickets come up, automated voices announce them over good loudspeakers in a pleasing timbre. Which is just as well, because there is a lot of waiting.

My reservation letter warns that I will be turned away if I am late for the appointment I made over the USCIS website, which offers you only one day to choose from in the coming month, a day seemingly picked at random each time. Once I am in the building, however, the appointments turn out to be a fiction. There is only the implacable queue of tickets, coded with a variety of letters. Yesterday I had a B. Today I have a U, which makes me feel special; there are not many Us. Even rarer are Xs. I wonder what fortunate, or unfortunate, souls deserve an X. Yet the letters’ true import is unknowable. An hour, two, three; all of us move towards our fates at the same stately pace.

This negation of its supplicants’ time, the sublimation of their schedules to its own, is just one of the many small ways in which the bureaucracy chips away at their autonomy. You may not bring food into the waiting room; water is allowed, but not any other drink, as if we were four-year-olds, liable to spill our iced tea or Coca-Cola on the seats and make them sticky. One woman surreptitiously gave potato crisps to her toddler, who scattered some on the floor; the guard came and reprimanded her, and then made everyone in the neighbouring seats move to another row until the cleaners came, as if the tuberous shards were toxic waste.

On entering the waiting room you must turn your mobile phone not to flight mode or vibrate mode or any other form of inoffensiveness, but fully off, as though entering a nuclear facility or the CIA, and the guards will watch while you do it. Thereafter, if they even see you holding it in your hand, they will order you to put it away. “In case someone else sees you and thinks you’re using it,” one of them explained to me. It made me think of the rules pertaining to very orthodox Jews, who must refrain not only from violating the Sabbath or the kosher laws, but from anything that might look like a violation, even when it isn’t one, for fear of provoking another Jew to transgression.

As in all government offices, there are signs everywhere. One says you must “cover your cough”. Others announce that the cashier does not accept cash, and more emphatically, “DOES NOT FURNISH IMMIGRATION INFORMATION”. They will take cheques, but another notice informs you that if you pay by cheque the government may use the information on it to request an electronic transfer and if so the funds may leave your account immediately; this is accompanied by a further notice explaining why, under the Privacy Act, they are obliged to post the first notice, and giving a website where you can find the text of the act and a toll-free number to call to ask for a copy in the post. (I note in passing that the reason for this legal sleight-of-hand is the need to justify not the peremptory transformation of a cheque into an electronic transfer, but the collection of the data that make it possible.)

When, yesterday, my turn finally came to present my plea, which was that my application had been pending for more than 90 days, the official first told me that the USCIS had given no undertaking to reply within 90 days, and then, that any complaints about delays were in the purview of a different office anyway. Only when I told her that I had booked my appointment (so-called) via a page on the USCIS website that specifically enjoined me to do so if more than 90 days had passed did she agree even to look into it.

As it happens, my reading matter during the hours of waiting has been Gabriel García Márquez’s “Voyage Through the Socialist Countries”. Its descriptions of the mind-numbing bureaucracy he encountered behind the Iron Curtain feel oddly familiar. It makes me reflect that, as utterly different as the Eastern bloc of 1957 and America of 2011 are, bureaucracy is not a system special to any form of government, but rather a trait of human behaviour that no amount of democracy and accountability can bring to heel. You can, in a democracy, force the government to put its rules up on a wall, send you a copy of them in the post, or even change them from time to time, but you can do nothing against the unremitting tendency of human beings, given any small domain over other human beings, to find the space within those rules to use their power to its fullest. The common description of bureaucrats as “little Hitlers” (does anyone know who first used this phrase?) fails, or wilfully refuses, to recognise that we all have a little Hitler in us, or more to the point, that Hitler had a little human in him too, and that a human given power will exercise it, no matter how measly it may be.

Especially, in fact, if it is measly. If you want to eat, use the toilet or make a phone call, you can leave the waiting room, but you must show your ticket number again each time you come back, “because,” the guard argues, “what if you’d lost it?” You may not use any device with a wi-fi signal, which seems a reasonable precaution against hackers until you consider that there is no prohibition on doing it just outside the waiting room, in the very heart of the federal building. You must not plug any device into a power socket, which is inexplicable, unless perhaps they are worried that someone will trip over your power cord and sue the United States government. You may use a laptop while seated in the waiting area (though not at the service counters), as long it violates neither of these conditions. There is nothing saying what you may write on the laptop, but I am keeping the text on my screen as small as I can, just in case.

THIS week the Obama administration apparently tried, unsuccessfully, to broker a deal in which the Palestinian Authority and other Arab governments would downgrade a proposed Security Council condemnation of the illegality of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank from a "resolution" to a "statement", in exchange for American acquiescence. In response, writes Politico's Ben Smith, knee-jerk pro-settlement Republicans and knee-jerk pro-settlement Democrats in Congress went bananas. (I'm not sure "went" is the appropriate verb here. "Remained" might be more accurate.) Steve Rothman, a Democratic representative from New Jersey, said that "any failure to stand with Israel during these difficult times in the Middle East will only encourage the enemies of America and Israel." The emptiness of the logic in Mr Rothman's statement beggars description. Meanwhile, Democrat Joe Crowley and Republican Joe Walsh are circulating a letter that says, inter alia:

Reports have surfaced that the United States is negotiating with a group of Arab nations about supporting a possible United Nations Security Council presidential statement critical of Israel and possibly taking other similar steps in exchange for Arab agreement to withdraw a UNSC resolution and deeming Israeli construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal. It is also not clear whether the U.S. would veto a resolution on settlements should it be brought to the UN Security Council. It should not be the practice of the U.S. to be conducting back door deals, of any sort, that weaken the strategic interests of any ally—let alone one of of our closest allies. We strongly urge you to make it clear that the U.S. will oppose any U.N efforts to pressure Israel on the "settlement" issue.

On this one, I have to confess, I'm of two minds. My first instinct is that one good reason why America should support a statement deeming Israeli construction on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem illegal is that Israeli construction on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem is illegal. It's rather pathetic to watch the way each of the statements issued in criticism of the Obama administration's stance dances frantically around the question of whether it's a good idea for Israel to be building more and more government-subsidised housing settlements exclusively reserved for Jews on land that does not belong to Israel, unless you subscribe to the idea that seizure by force legitimises ownership, or to the equally alarming idea that the government of Binyamin Netanyahu was ordered to expand the condo units at Maale Adumim 3,000 years ago by God.

However, I hesitate to really embrace the point that America should call the settlements illegal because they are, as it's based on the idea that governments ought to say things because they are true. I don't actually think that's a very compelling principle in diplomacy, and in any case it's so rarely observed in practice that I'm not sure what the point of advocating it would be.

I READ this Bob Herbert column first with incredulity. "As the throngs celebrated in Cairo," Mr Herbert begins, "I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States." Because, really, nothing on Earth is so important that it should keep our minds turning immediately to the only subject that really matters: us. Thus, when we encounter the first exhilarating steps of an oppressed people struggling toward popular self-rule, we simply can't help wondering about democracy here in the US of A.

Then I read it again, with annoyance. Mr Herbert wanted to say that American democracy is broken because it's been hijacked by the rich. This is one of approximately five columns liberal pundits phone in when they are uninspired or feeling lazy. Not that you can sleepwalk through a phone-in! Oh, there's work to do. First, you've got to find a piping hot news hook. This can be accomplished by staring at the headlines until you run across a word that also appears in one of your ready-made gotta-get-to-brunch op-ed templates. So, let's see... Egyptians have cast out a dictator in hopes of one day establishing a democracy. Democracy! Rich people have hijacked our democracy! Then it's just a matter of peppering the thing with au courant Pavlovian keywords: "corporate stranglehold", "Citizens United decision", "Koch brothers". Finally, one must summon the energy to loop back to the hook. "The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away." Boom! This is is how they do it in the bigs, folks. 

None of this is to say that worries similar to Mr Herbert's about the undue influence of money in politics are unworthy of a careful substantive response. I started this post intending to offer such a response. It just turns out that this particular column's paint-by-numbers roteness slaps you in the face so hard that I couldn't help concluding it doesn't merit one. 

SCOTT SUMNER isn't just one of the internet's finest economic commentators. He's also a crack gentleman amateur political theorist. In a recent post, Mr Sumner offers a fresh and intriguing political typology. Behold:

And here's how Mr Sumner describes his classificatory scheme:

My goal here is to set things up in such a way that each group has a values affinity to those on one side, and an ideological affinity to those on the other side. So you could circle any two adjoining groups, and describe a common feature:

1.  Progressives/Pragmatic libertarians:  Both tend to be secular utilitarians, or at least consequentialists

2.  Pragmatic and dogmatic libertarians:  Both favor very small government

3.  Dogmatic libertarians and idealistic conservatives:  Both are nostalgic for the past, and revere the (original intent of) the Constitution.

4.  Idealistic conservatives and corrupt Republicans:  Both are Republicans.

5.  Corrupt Republicans and corrupt Dems:  Both believe in realpolitik, are disdainful of fuzzy-headed, idealistic intellectuals.

6.  Corrupt Democrats and idealistic progressives:  Both are Democrats

Thus on values there are three pairings:  utilitarian, natural rights, and selfish.  On ideology there are three different pairings:  Democrat, Republican and libertarian.

By "corrupt", Mr Sumner means politicians and pundits who prioritise the interests of the pressure groups within their party's politcal coalition over their publicly-espoused ideals. (How can you implement your ideals if you don't win elections!) I would suggest Mr Sumner include among the corrupt those who, through flights of wishful thinking, are able to convince themselves that their conservative or progressive principles conveniently align almost perfectly with the clientele of the Republican or Democratic Party.

I find Mr Sumner's typology quite congenial probably because I have Mr Sumner's politics, more or less, and his way of carving up the ideological space places us where we see ourselves: as "pragmatic libertarians" leaning a bit more toward "progressive idealism" than "dogmatic libertarianism". That said, there is something troubling about the lack of parallelism in Mr Sumner's scheme. While conservatism and progressivism both have "idealistic" and "corrupt" variants, libertarianism is only "dogmatic" and "pragmatic". I think the ideological influence but electoral insignificance of libertarianism goes some way toward justifying its different treatment. But I wouldn't want to leave out the possibility of conservatism and progressivism that is pragmatic in the sense of pursuing conservative and progressive values through practical, empirically-tested means, and not in the "corrupt" sense of catering to the electoral interests of a partisan faction.

Indeed, Mr Sumner argues that policy-minded intellectuals of all ideological stripes have arrived at rough consensus on a number of issues ranging from occupational licensing to urban policy, but I don't think we'd want to say that this makes the conservatives and progressives among them honorary pragmatic libertarians. Mr Sumner's illuminating diagram would make more sense to me if it made room for pragmatic but non-corrupt, non-idealistic conservatives and progressives. Maybe somebody can figure out how to draw that.