Brendan Nyhan

I want to briefly note the bravery of the Iraqi people yesterday. When we study political science in academia, it’s easy to lose sight of the magic and power of democracy. The fact that so many Iraqis risked their lives to exercise a right we take for granted is simply incredible.

The question now is what this all means. The situation over there is still incredibly difficult, but the election gave me some hope, at least, that catastrophe can be avoided. I think Slate’s Fred Kaplan put it best:

Few sights are more stirring than the televised images of Iraqi citizens risking their lives to vote in their country’s first election in a half-century, kissing the ballot boxes, dancing in the streets, and declaring their hopes for a new day of democracy.

And yet, the challenges and uncertainties that seemed so daunting last week—about Iraq’s security, society, and governance—are unlikely to turn less daunting next week, next month, or the month after.

Yes, as President Bush said in his address this afternoon, the Iraqi people showed the world they want freedom. But this has never been in doubt. The real questions of democracy are what people want to do with that freedom, whether their contesting desires and interests can be mediated by a political order, and whether they view that political order as legitimate. Voting for leaders is a vital but very early step in this process.

…[I]s it too romantic to see signs of real hope in today’s election? One thing is clear: The day marked a terrible defeat for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had declared democracy to be an “infidel” belief. He and his goons passed out leaflets threatening to kill anyone and everyone who dared to vote; they dramatized their threat by killing dozens of police and poll workers in the days leading up to the election. And yet millions of Iraqis—including a fairly large number of Sunnis who live in Shiite areas—defied their fears and voted. Whatever mayhem they inflict in the coming days, it will be hard for anyone to interpret their actions as reflecting the beliefs of “the street.”

Reynolds’ post illustrates two of the biggest problems with the blog triumphalism being peddled by various acolytes:

Blog factionalization – The ecosystem of blogs is increasingly balkanized. It’s hard work to push against your own ideological inclinations, and most people don’t do it very often, especially after writing a blog for a long time. In addition, there are substantial incentives to develop a consistent brand to encourage repeat visitors, and the way to develop a brand is usually to deliver opinion from a consistent ideological perspective, which draws visits from readers and links from bloggers who share those views.

Over time, we see increasing clustering by ideology, with Kos, Marshall, Atrios, etc. in one network and Sullivan, Reynolds, Powerline, Belmont Club, The Corner, etc. in another. Of course, everyone filters the information they receive, accepting some points and discarding others; the problem is when like-minded communities start mostly talking to each other. The result is that their views usually become more extreme. This is what Cass Sunstein calls the law of group polarization in his book Republic.com, and while things haven’t become nearly as bad as he predicted, the phenomenon is clearly at work in communities of right- and left-wing blogs that constantly feed each other horror stories about their opponents that are taken as representative.

For example, Reynolds is constantly being sent — and linking to — negative posts and articles about the left, and posts very little counter-stereotypical material. Similarly, he freely admits that he filters out bad news from Iraq since he believes the media already covers it.

The incentives for bad polemics – As Matthew Yglesias wrote in a great post last year, writers who make inflammatory, misleading or wrongheaded arguments attract vastly more controversy and attention than those who make good ones. Bad arguments generate many responses from the other side (Yglesias cites Michael Moore and Samuel Huntington as examples of this), while good ones are strategically ignored. Andrew Sullivan, for example, can be a brilliant writer (see his early work on gay marriage), but his blog writing gets so much attention in large part because it’s both interesting and almost totally unfiltered, which leads to lots of mistakes, retractions and so forth. A “love him or hate him” personality cult arises, and the audience swells. Reynolds writes quick, cutting posts as well, and this has clearly boosted his audience for the same reasons. Further down the blog food chain, a similar dynamic applies — ridiculous “Fiskings” and other lousy polemics are often the best way to generate readership and links from top bloggers.

I still believe in the potential of blogs – as we wrote in All the President’s Spin, the blog culture of fact-checking can help correct inaccuracies in the mainstream media. But this depends on (a) blogs doing credible fact-checking and (b) careful filtering of it to sort the actual mistakes from the ideological garbage. If blogs are mostly peddling nonsense, they’ll get tuned out.

(Notes: In the interest of disclosure, Glenn was a good friend to Spinsanity; I don’t mean to pick on him in particular. Also, as a political scientist, I have a real appreciation of the importance of ideology in bringing coherence to politics, but it has obvious and important downsides as well.)

The LA Times is running a correction in the middle of the online article where the original error appeared. Good for them. Slate’s the only other major publication I’ve seen doing this as a general practice – that needs to change.

Meanwhile, even though it published articles using two conflicting definitions of the term, the Washington Post appears to have not run a correction, clarification or explanatory article on the interrogration procedure known as “waterboarding.” I emailed the reporters in question and ombudsman Michael Getler, but to no avail. Jeffrey Smith responded to me directly, but that’s not the same thing as clarifying the issue for the record in print.

After discussing a Colorado professor who compared 9/11 victims to Adolf Eichmann, Glenn Reynolds lets the stereotypes and misinformation fly:

When Ted Kennedy can make an absurd and borderline-traitorous speech on the war, when Michael Moore shares a VIP box with the last Democratic President but one, when Barbara Boxer endorses a Democratic consultant/blogger whose view of American casualties in Iraq is “screw ’em,” well, this is the authentic face of the Left. Or what remains of it.

Calling Kennedy’s speech “borderline traitorous” is a hell of a charge to make without any supporting evidence. When did it become illegal to disagree with Reynolds on the conduct of the war in Iraq? (The Wall Street Journal makes a similar suggestion that Kennedy is hoping for American failure today; more cheap shots here.) And of course, the “Democratic consultant/blogger” is Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos, who was talking about the killings of American mercenaries, not military casualties (he’s actually a veteran). What Zuniga said is still deeply disreputable, but Reynolds is misrepresenting it.

The larger problem, as Max Sawicky pointed out in a post on this same subject, is the rush to stereotype based on a handful of extreme, unrepresentative examples. This is becoming a pervasive habit of mind in the spin culture precisely because it’s effective, but it’s deeply damaging to reasonable democratic discourse.

Update 1/30: To clarify, I disagree fundamentally with Kennedy’s speech. The presence of US troops is obviously helping to fuel the insurgency, as he says, but it seems clear that pulling them out on the timetable he advocates would create a power vacuum leading to civil war. That’s a stupid idea — and one Kennedy expressed at a terrible time — but it’s hardly traitorous.

When Senator Barbara Boxer said to Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice on January 18 that “I personally believe — this is my personal view — that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth,” a statement that made quite a bit of news, you would think that reporters would present readers with an evaluation of the evidence in question. You would be wrong.

Boxer actually made specific charges. After the much-quoted line above, she said, “And I don’t say it lightly. And I’m going to go into the documents that show your statements and the facts at the time.” Then she laid out several pieces of evidence – Rice’s use of the inflammatory phrase “mushroom cloud” to suggest that Saddam Hussein might soon attack the US with a nuclear weapon; contradictions between her pre- and post-war statements about how quickly Saddam could acquire a weapon; her claim that Saddam’s pursuit of aluminum tubes proved the existence of a nuclear program; and her assertions about the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Whatever you think about Boxer, Rice or the war, these are substantive points that reporters should at least mention and clarify for readers. Without endorsing Boxer’s specific statement, I will point out that we document a number of misleading, inflammatory or false claims that Rice made before or after the war in All the President’s Spin (see the Rice index entry). The issue of what she said before and after the war deserves attention and debate.

Instead, though, we got superficial coverage of the faceoff as a substance-free partisan clash or a dramatic catfight (an approach mocked on “The Daily Show”). Here’s Glenn Kessler’s entire account of Boxer’s statement in the Washington Post on January 19:

In one especially heated exchange, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) quoted from Rice’s statements before the war about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction — which were never found — and all but accused Rice of lying about the rationale for war in a zeal to promote the conflict.

A Lexis Nexis search of the “major newspapers” category shows that only two ran news stories in the immediate aftermath of the hearing that even mentioned the aluminum tubes issue or the phrase “mushroom cloud” – the San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun on the 19th (the LA Times published a transcript of the exchange on the same day). A few more did so later — the Christian Science Monitor (1/24), Washington Post (1/26) and the LA Times (1/26) — but it was too little, too late. In short, the press failed… again.

I just read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia for the first time for a seminar on liberal democracy, and while I’m a non-libertarian who disagrees with most of his positive arguments, it’s brilliant. Nozick was also a wonderful writer (a special delight after slogging through John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice), and the combination of his intellectual and rhetorical genius is absolutely devastating when he’s taking on cant and bad arguments. Given my Spinsanity background, I can’t help but love it.

Reading Nozick also reminded me of a hilarious New Republic article from the 1980s documenting how this passionate libertarian extorted more than $30,000 from his landlord by exploiting rent control laws of the sort that he decries philosophically. It doesn’t undermine the strength of his arguments, but it certainly casts him in a much poorer light. Check it out.

A bipartisan letter to the Congressional leadership in the Weekly Standard calling for a major expansion of the military – amen! (link via Kevin Drum). The key passage:

The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today’s (and tomorrow’s) missions and challenges.

So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years. There is abundant evidence that the demands of the ongoing missions in the greater Middle East, along with our continuing defense and alliance commitments elsewhere in the world, are close to exhausting current U.S. ground forces. For example, just late last month, Lieutenant General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, reported that “overuse” in Iraq and Afghanistan could be leading to a “broken force.” Yet after almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice’s term, a “generational commitment.” The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.

Media Matters and other liberal pundits have been attacking Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard for allegedly serving as “consultants” for the inaugural address and then praising it on TV without disclosing their role. The claim is based on reports from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post that were ambiguously worded:

LAT: “As they drafted the speech this month, White House political aide Karl Rove and chief speechwriter Michael Gerson held a two-hour seminar with a panel of foreign policy scholars, including several leading neocons — newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University and Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institution — according to a person who was present.”

WP: “One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House. White House senior adviser Karl Rove attended, according to one source, but mostly listened to what became a lively exchange over U.S. policy and the fight for liberty.”

But it turns out that Kristol and Krauthammer may not have been giving advice on a speech. In the Post, Fred Hiatt seeks to refute the charge:

As to Krauthammer, he has gotten a bum rap. He has been described as “consulting” on Bush’s inaugural address and then praising it. But Krauthammer was invited to the White House with a small group of academics and commentators to discuss Middle East policy; though a speechwriter was present, the inaugural address was not on the agenda and, according to several participants, Krauthammer never discussed it. He wasn’t paid. And when he commented on television (not in his column) on the speech, he was not being entirely complimentary when he called it revolutionary and radical.

And Editor & Publisher’s reporting yielded a similar response. Will Media Matters and the other accusers deal with this evidence, or just ignore it? Maybe the participants in the seminar should have disclosed that they were there, but in terms of journalistic ethics, taking part in an informal policy discussion and consulting in the preparation of a speech are not the same thing.

Update 1/31: Media Matters has posted a new article on Kristol and Krauthammer pointing to contradictions between the defenses posted above and the passage below from a Howard Kurtz story:

KURTZ: Liz Spayd, the paper’s assistant managing editor for national news, said: “We stand by the story we wrote. We have a firsthand source who says it was crystal clear a primary purpose of the meeting was to seek advice on both Bush’s inaugural and State of the Union speeches.”

But ombudsman Michael Getler’s depiction of the writing points back to ambiguity:

GETLER: The meeting was held on Jan. 10 and the White House invitation concerned a discussion of “American foreign policy at it relates to the Middle East.” Among the questions to be discussed were: “What should this Administration do/say more of — and what should it do/say less of? What are the key, achievable goals we should aim for during the next four years?” Presidential speechwriter and policy adviser Michael J. Gerson was in attendance.

I’m inclined to agree with Getler that K&K should have disclosed their attendance at the meeting or, even better, not gone in the first place. But the original Media Matters suggestion that they were “consultants” does not appear to be supported by the evidence.

A certain type of nasty race-baiting is becoming more and more pervasive at the national level. Up until a few years ago, it was more common to exploit anti-black or anti-minority resentment, and though some politicians still do so, we’re seeing a trend toward both sides suggesting that the other is racist or pro-discrimination instead. For example, when Democrats opposed judges nominated by President Bush, Republicans have accused them, as the Washington Post put it, of being “anti-Catholic, anti-South and anti-Hispanic” for opposing judges with those backgrounds.

Here are two recent examples of this. First, Colbert King, writing in the Washington Post, suggested that Senator Barbara Boxer’s harsh questioning of Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearing was motivated by racial stereotypes:

What’s the motive behind this kind of assault? Is it a desire to demean or put her down? Is it a wish to marginalize Rice in the public eye, to suggest that by reason of her intelligence, ability or integrity, she is unqualified to hold her present post or to become secretary of state?

A senator who believes the Bush administration lied about the war, made a mess of postwar reconstruction and ruined relations with long-standing allies would be justified in holding Rice accountable, and in my view, in voting against her confirmation. Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Boxer and John Kerry did as much.

But slurring her as a hollow-headed marionette controlled by Bush? What’s that all about? It calls to mind John Sylvester, a white radio talk show host in Madison, Wis., who recently went Boxer and Oliphant one better — or worse. “Sly,” as he calls himself, went on the air and caricatured Rice as a servile black, laboring slavishly for the Bush White House. He called her, of all things, an “Aunt Jemima.”

The Boxer-Oliphant-Sylvester take on Condoleezza Rice stands in sharp contrast to the assessment offered by Dorothy Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, who wrote in a letter to The Post this week: “Despite the challenges she will face, Ms. Rice’s appointment is a time for women of color to smile.”

Unfortunately, King’s comments are part of a long pattern of similar accusations, as the liberal group Media Matters documents.

Now the GOP is trying to link Democrats to pro-slavery members of the party from 150 years ago:

Condoleezza Rice took the oath Friday as the first black woman to be secretary of State, then immediately reached back into history to invoke the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

Her words were the latest example of President Bush and his top aides citing the Republican Party’s often-forgotten 19th century antislavery roots — a strategy that GOP leaders believe will help them make inroads among black voters in the 21st century.

And if it reminds voters that the Democrats once embraced slavery, that’s not such a bad byproduct, strategists say.

Bush, who keeps a bust of Lincoln prominently displayed in the Oval Office, is making Civil War references a staple of his speeches promoting democracy overseas and policy changes at home. And a glossy, GOP-produced “2005 Republican Freedom Calendar,” spotlighting key moments in the party’s civil rights history, has been distributed to party officials nationwide.

“We started our party with the express intent of protecting the American people from the Democrats’ pro-slavery policies that expressly made people inferior to the state,” Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) wrote in a letter printed on the calendar.

The letter continued: “Today, the animating spirit of the Republican Party is exactly the same as it was then: free people, free minds, free markets, free expression, and unlimited individual opportunity.”

Note how Cox implicitly equates Democratic support for slavery before the Civil War with their support for more government intervention in the economy today (both of which make “people inferior to the state”). This is ugly stuff.

The verdict from John Gravois in Slate is that the ideas of Hernando DeSoto, the massively hyped Peruvian economist, have not worked well anywhere they’ve been implemented. In some cases, they’ve even made things worse. I’m not a development economist and I haven’t read DeSoto, but the idea of legally titling squatter land to provide collateral for loans to the poor always seemed too cute to me. It reminds me of Robert Putnam’s social capital concept, which was popularized in Bowling Alone — both are fascinating in their potential and have generated vast academic literatures, but their real world impact has turned out to be limited at best. The problem in DeSoto’s case is that he appears to rely on implausible assumptions about capital markets. As Gravois shows, very few private banks are eager to loan to poor people based on slum property. What a disappointment.

PS Are there any more systematic treatments of DeSoto out there? Links welcome in comments.