Democracy in America

JIM DEMINT was not on track to become a pillar of the Senate. He replaced Fritz Hollings, who retired, in 2004 and then cruised to re-election (over one of the strangest major-party senate nominees in memory) in 2010. But he has long supported term limits, and had all but officially ruled out running for a third term in 2016. Without another campaign on the horizon, one can assume that he was already looking toward his post-Senate future. Still, his resignation, announced earlier today and effective when he leaves to head the Heritage Foundation next month, counts as a moderate surprise—surprising because he had four years left in his term, but only moderate because the journey's end was visible, and his power and influence may well have peaked.

For all his reputation as a right-wing bomb thrower, Mr DeMint was at heart a prodigious fund-raiser, and an outstanding ad-man and marketer (before being elected to the House in 1998 he ran his own market-research firm in Greenville). In 2007 he backed Mitt Romney over John McCain, citing the former's signature health-care law in Massachusetts as evidence that he could "take good conservative ideas, like private health insurance, and apply them to the need to have everyone insured... Those kinds of ideas show an ability to bring people together that we haven't seen in national politics for a while. We don't need the nation to be more polarised."

But that was before Mr Obama took office, and the market for polarisation boomed. In 2010 Mr DeMint's PAC backed five winning insurgents in the Senate, two of whom—Marco Rubio and Rand Paul—look likely to run for president in four years. He bested Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, in a fight over earmarks (among other scraps), and appeared to be about the business of building himself a congressional power base to rival Mr McConnell's. But in 2010 he did not only back winners. Among the top ten recipients of his Senate Conservatives Fund's largesse were Christine O'Donnell, Joe Miller, Sharron Angle, Ken Buck and Dino Rossi, ideologically pure losers all. What's more, they all lost winnable races. One could argue, then, that Mr DeMint's contribution to the 2010 Senate was a net zero. The long-term effects may in fact have been worse: his candidates won in deeply-red Utah and Kentucky as well as purple Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, but the five losers failed to beat vulnerable Democrats in largely Democratic states (Alaska excepted). The PAC's 2012 record was similarly ambiguous (though by 2012 Mr DeMint had cut formal ties with the group, allowing it to become a SuperPAC), backing winners in red Texas, Arizona and Nebraska and losers in purple Ohio and Indiana. To put it another way, his candidates tend to do best where Republicans do best anyway; his candidates have tended, overall, to falter when they have to fight for the centre. Mr DeMint has proven far more adept at picking off Republicans than Democrats. That is the record of an opportunist, not a kingmaker.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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WHAT is Grover Norquist's goal? What does he want? Is it, as the mission statement of his group Americans for Tax Reform intimates, to keep the federal government's power in check by keeping taxes low, and to promote "fiscal responsibility and accountability, especially spending restraint and the promotion of a more transparent and accountable government"? If so, then he ought to prize politicians such as Saxby Chambliss, my home state's senior senator. In his 18 years in Congress, the only thing remotely resembling a tax increase he voted for was a 15-cent hike on cigarette taxes. But even that was part of a larger bill that lowered the tax burden on most American families by around $140 billion. He has an 85% lifetime rating from the economically conservative Club for Growth, and a 91% rating from the US Chamber of Commerce. He introduced the Fair Tax Act of 2011, which would have eliminated federal income taxes and the IRS and replaced them with "a national sales tax to be administered primarily by the States".

On the other hand, if Mr Norquist's goal is only incidentally to ensure that taxes stay low while his principal goal is ensuring the continued relevance of Grover Norquist, than he ought to whack Mr Chambliss squarely in the knees. After all, Mr Chambliss had the temerity to say that he cared "more about my country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge." He told an audience of Republicans in Cobb County, just north of Atlanta, that he did not "want to be dictated to by anyone in Washington," a clear reference to Mr Norquist. And he said that he expected his disagreement with Mr Norquist—a disagreement, let's remember, on whether he ought to be bound by Mr Norquist's pledge, not on the substance of that pledge—would lead to a primary challenge in 2014. Mr Chambliss has not actually voted to raise anybody's taxes, yet he may find himself in Mr Norquist's crosshairs.

The ground for such punishment is fertile: a recent PPP poll shows that 43% of Georgia's Republican primary voters would prefer someone more conservative than Mr Chambliss, compared to just 38% who support Mr Chambliss. Once you swap out Some Guy for specific people, however, things start looking up for Mr Chambliss. He leads Tom Price, a congressman from the northern Atlanta suburbs; Paul Broun, a congressman who sits on the House Science Committee but also believes much mainstream science is "lies straight from the pit of hell"; and Karen Handel, who in 2010 came within a single percentage point of being elected governor but was dogged by a non-anti-gay record. The only conservative challenger who fared well against Mr Chambliss was Herman Cain, who led him 50-36 in a hypothetical head-to-head race. Now, I think I speak for all political journalists when I say I dearly hope Mr Cain will run; no campaign or candidate was as much fun to cover this year as the Herminator. And while he previously said he did not want to run, that was before this poll was published.

But here's the problem. Dig a little deeper into the poll's crosstabs, and you will find Mr Chambliss running strongly against several Georgia Democrats: Roy Barnes, a former governor; Max Cleland, a former senator; John Barrow, a congressman from south Georgia; Kasim Reed, Atlanta's mayor; and Jason Carter, Jimmy's grandson, a state senator (none of whom have declared an interest in running, and none of whom I would peg as likely candidates). Mr Price, however—a decent stand-in for Some Guy (R-GA)—runs significantly worse against Democratic challengers. We have been here before. Georgia may not have voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992, but it is not deep red; Barack Obama won over 45% of the vote, and demographic trends favour Democrats more than Republicans. The more formidable challengers to Mr Chambliss may well sit out 2014 and wait for those trends to play out a bit more. But a bruising primary, or a primary that Mr Chambliss loses, might make them change their minds. As for Mr Norquist, if he finds rebellion hard to stomach now, just wait until he delivers a Senate seat into Democratic hands.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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THE bad guy in Bruce Bartlett's autobiographical piece in the American Conservative ("Revenge of the Reality-Based Community"), chronicling his journey from apostle to apostate of the conservative right, is "epistemic closure". In a passage widely cited on various blogs, Mr Bartlett recalls worrying at a conservative cocktail party in 2004 that other guests would attack him for letting himself be quoted criticising the Bush administration in an article in the New York Times, only to find that "not one person had read it or cared in the slightest what the New York Times had to say about anything." His friends, he writes, had cocooned themselves inside an insular world of all-conservative media, a practice which in the long run led them to lose track of reality and to be beaten in two consecutive presidential elections. Paul Krugman, naturally, finds this analysis congenial, and guesses it's in large measure responsible for the GOP's willingness to believe internal polls showing Mitt Romney would win in November, when impartial analyses of independent polls indicated he was going to lose.

But Mr Krugman then suggests this is tied to another issue, "a phenomenon I notice a lot on the right (you can see it often in the comments on this blog): the persistent portrayal of people who disagree with them as marginal figures with trivial support... Or, to be self-centered, the constant insistence by some people that nobody pays attention to what yours truly says." On this count, the argument that epistemic closure is the main culprit gets a bit complicated.

I understand Mr Krugman to be referring here to the stubborn adherence by people in positions of power to the doctrine of expansionary austerity, and their refusal to take seriously the point of view of opposing economists, including himself, despite the abundant and ever-growing evidence over the past two years that austerity under current economic circumstances is extremely contractionary. This certainly looks like a case of people refusing to acknowledge evidence or engage with opposing points of view. But belief in expansionary austerity is far too widely shared in circles that have nothing to do with American conservatism for the epistemic closure of American conservative discourse or media to have much to do with it. The idea that cutting the government's budget deficit is a prerequisite for economic growth is dominant in northern European politics, not just on the right, but on all but the farthest reaches of the left too. The fact that American conservatives watch Fox News and don't read the New York Times doesn't help explain why centre-left parties in Germany and the Netherlands believe it's imperative to slash their countries' budget deficits in the face of the worsening European recession.

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ONE month remains in the battle over impending sequestration and tax increases on Capitol Hill, and no one can settle on the right metaphor to capture just what will happen on January 1st if no deal is reached.

The “Thelma-and-Louise”-esque “fiscal cliff” was coined by Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, in February. At once the scariest and most misleading image, “fiscal cliff” gives the impression of a federal government hurtling over the edge, with legislators flung into a valley of mayhem and privation, limbs scattered among so many reams of tattered paper.

Democrats seem to favour the term “fiscal slope”, a milquetoast alternative which suggests that following the January 1st deadline, America will find itself on a slow, gentle descent into recession that can be fairly easily reversed in the first few months of 2013 with the right legislative fixes. This is one slope that is not so slippery.

And then there is Ezra Klein’s favoured term:

We at Wonkblog call it the “austerity crisis.” That solves two problems. First, the danger the economy faces is too much austerity too quickly, so swapping the term “fiscal” for the word “austerity” actually better reflects the situation. Second, while we don’t know if it’ll be a cliff or a slope, we do know that it will, if permitted to go on for long enough, be a “crisis.” Thus, the “austerity crisis.”

The most austere of the three metaphors, “austerity crisis” nevertheless stirs anxiety in anyone who watched Greek parliamentarians spar over budget cuts and dodge petrol bombs thrown by an angry populace last month. At least the Greeks were picking and choosing their budget cuts and tax increases; if Congress does nothing, it will enable big automatic cuts to domestic and defence discretionary spending and bring all tax levels back up to where they were under Bill Clinton. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this heady budgetary cocktail will lead to a 0.5% drop in GDP and 9.1% unemployment.

Will Congress let this happen?

Despite new signs of intransigence from both sides, most observers are betting against that possibility. Last week Tom Cole, a representative from Oklahoma, became the first Republican lawmaker to state his support for cutting a deal on the Bush tax cuts that would let rates for the wealthy rise. Other GOP legislators are abandoning their pledge to Grover Norquist to never raise taxes. The stage seems to be set for a package of budget cuts, entitlement reforms and tax increases to gain bipartisan approval. The question is when. Here is how UBS, the global financial-services firm, assessed the probabilities of different scenarios in a recent report to its investors (a “pothole” is a temporary bump in the road in early 2013 if a deal isn’t concluded in December):

Their best bet is that Congress and the president will reach a grand bargain—a comprehensive package of budget cuts and targeted tax increases for high earners—some months after the deadline passes. But UBS estimates only a 10% chance of a full solution in December.

Which raises the question: why not do it now? Why subject America to the threat of another credit-rating downgrade and more economic instability? Why not use these weeks before the Christmas holiday to prepare a sensible package for the American people? Why not use this moment as an opportunity to govern responsibly?

Instead, the apt metaphor for the partisan dance now on display in Washington is the game of chicken. Yes, chicken: the James Dean, “Rebel Without a Cause” dare-you game in which you die or are shamed for being the first to jump out of a car hurtling towards an abyss. The objective of the game is to glorify the bigger risk-taker, and it often ends in tragedy.

Political leaders are not elected to achieve dubious signifiers of glory for themselves or their parties. They are not elected to endanger their constituents. The president and members of Congress should put an end to the cascade of doomsday metaphors and address the crisis now. We’ll sate our appetite for cliffhangers at the movies.

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RACIAL politics were a lot more charged back in 1991, when Derrick Bell, then a professor at Harvard law school, went on strike to demand the hiring of a black woman faculty member, and at the same moment inadvertently launched the political career of the student who would become America's first black president. In the midst of that polarised racial environment, Barack Obama, then a member of the law school's black students' association and president of its Law Review, made it clear that while he supported Mr Bell, his natural inclinations were towards compromise and conciliation. A video of a young Mr Obama delivering a speech to protesters, released early this year by the late Andrew Breitbart in the vain hope it would hurt Mr Obama's presidential campaign, shows him smoothing Mr Bell's ego and drawing laughs from the crowd with comically exaggerated flattery. At the same time, as Gary Kamiya noted in Salon when the video was released, Mr Obama "tried to find a middle ground in the bitter dispute." Mr Kamiya quotes from Thomas Sugrue's 2010 book, "Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race":

Obama positioned himself as someone who could reconcile Harvard’s bitter differences by bringing a tone of civility to the debate. He refused to denounce his critics and hurl polemics. In the words of Bradford Berenson, a conservative student who would later work in the second Bush administration, “Even though he was clearly a liberal, he didn’t appear to the conservatives in the review to be taking sides in the tribal warfare.”

Obama’s position in the middle allowed him to build a winning coalition of liberal and conservatives in his bid to be elected president of the Harvard Law review in February 1990. Later that year, in a dispute about the law review’s affirmative action policy, Obama again attempted to reconcile the opposing camps. He defended the principle of affirmative action while suggesting that he respected the “depth and sincerity” of its opponents beliefs.

The inclination to bridge ideological and partisan gaps became the defining trait of Mr Obama's character and of his political career. David Remnick, in his biography "The Bridge", wrote that during Mr Obama's time in the Senate, "conciliation was his default mode, the dominant strain of his political personality." In his 2008 speech on race, in his televised meetings with Republicans during the Obamacare negotiations, and in his meetings with Wall Street titans, Mr Obama has displayed the same pattern Mr Berenson recognised: first, he voices the concerns of the opposition in order to make it clear he understands and to some extent shares them. Then he puts forward a proposal he views as an acceptable compromise. Indeed, Mr Kamiya argues, the conciliatory impulse is Mr Obama's Achilles heel, the trait that at one point threatened to make a half-baked disaster of his presidency.

Obama has shown time and again that he will not get tough until he absolutely has to—and sometimes not even then. He’s conflict-averse. He prefers making beautiful speeches to taking on enemies, or committing himself to one position. He seems to always be slipping away from the fight, thinking he can have it both ways. It is a trait that got him elected, but it is his greatest weakness.

As of yesterday, Barack Obama, the great mediator, appears to have left the building. The proposal his administration has offered Republicans to avoid the fiscal cliff is a frankly Democratic proposal, reflecting Democratic priorities and economic beliefs. Mr Obama offers to achieve the necessary deficit reduction by raising $1.6 trillion in taxes over ten years, almost entirely from the rich, and by cutting up to $400 billion from the Medicare budget, if Republicans can come up with a proposal to do so. At the same time, the proposal extends the suspension of payroll taxes and long-term unemployment insurance, both measures targeted to aid the poor and middle class, and designed to minimise the contractionary hit the still-fragile US economic recovery will take next year if current law is not changed. This is progressive taxation and spending policy designed to reduce income inequality and protect the social safety net, reflecting a Keynesian belief in counter-cyclical economic policy focused on protecting demand by sparing the taxpayers most likely to spend rather than save. It's precisely what one might expect from a Democratic administration.

Whether Republicans will be able to put forward their own priorities and ultimately come to a compromise proposal depends on the GOP leadership, and on whether it now has enough control over its fractious, ideologically extremist tea-party backbenchers to be able to negotiate. The initial rhetoric coming from Mitch McConnell and John Boehner is not promising. But given the automatic tax hikes and spending cuts the Republicans will face if they fail to reach a compromise, and the fact that Mr Obama's proposals to hike taxes on the rich back to Clinton-era levels are overwhelmingly popular, it is difficult to imagine they will be able to avoid negotiating. And we've seen Republicans characterise Mr Obama's proposals as unacceptably left-wing before. In fact, that's what we've seen every time Mr Obama has come out with a proposal, regardless of how conciliatory those proposals were. When Mr Obama offered a health-care reform plan based on Republican proposals from the 1990s, when he offered to close the deficit with formulas including two dollars in spending cuts for every dollar of taxes raised, when he offered financial reform legislation that declined to break up large banks or ring-fence risky trading activities, Mr Obama encountered a blanket wall of Republican opposition and rhetoric painting him as the most radically left-wing president in history.

The old saw, which Robert Frost started retailing heavily in his late-life publicity blitz around JFK's inauguration, goes that "a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." (Apparently the first available citation is actually from William Earnest Hocking, a Harvard philosophy professor, in 1942.) Mr Obama may at one point have had a vision of his presidency as standing above the partisan fray in Congress, brokering compromise. This seems not to be a time in which such a presidency is possible. The partisan incentives in current American politics prevent Republicans from giving Mr Obama any credit when he attempts to be pre-emptively conciliatory, and Mr Obama appears to have decided that in the fiscal-cliff negotiations at least, he's better off negotiating as an interested party, rather than as a mediator.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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NEW YORK CITY went a day without a murder on Monday, which according to police was the first time anyone could remember that happening. Overall, the city's murder rate this year is down 23%, reaching levels last seen in 1960. This is a milestone in the 20-year-long decline of violent crime in the Big Apple. It's cause for celebration, and Reuters reports that crime expert Tom Repetto attributes the success in part to the city's aggressive policing strategies, the famous "broken windows" tactics that got started in the 1990s under Ray Kelly, the police chief, and have more recently included the controversial stop-and-frisk policy.

But hold on a minute. Up in Boston, they also had tremendous success in cutting murder rates in the 1990s. But they didn't focus on the broken-windows strategy, stop-and-frisk, or going after petty offenders. Instead they launched a project called "Operation Ceasefire" to cut gang violence. That project, as David Kennedy, a criminology professor at John Jay College who was instrumental in developing the programme, explained last year on "Fresh Air", had two basic prongs. First, it used community diplomacy to enlist respected neighbourhood figures to make it clear to gang members that it was their own relatives and neighbours, not the police, who needed them to stop the shooting. Second, it employed an innovative policing idea in which the most violent gang at any given time would be relentlessly targeted by police until it was effectively neutralised, followed by whichever gang then rose to the top of the list. This creates competition among gangs to refrain from lethal violence; it's also one of the key proposals in Mark Kleiman's book on how to reduce America's prison population, "When Brute Force Fails".

But hold on another minute! What's that you say, Eric Tucker of the Associated Press? Washington, DC is likely to see its first year in decades with less than 100 murders? Wow! In the late 1980s and early 1990s Washington had over 500 murders per year. Why the decline? No single factor, says Mr Tucker. A little of this, a little of that, a little of something else you probably never even thought of. Gentrification means the city has fewer dangerous neighbourhoods. Police have better technology and shorter response times. Community policing is better. And "better medical care, honed through lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, means patients who were once stabilized at the scene are more likely to be taken directly to the hospital, where they have access to improved blood transfusion processes." Also, the mayor is no longer a guy who smokes crack.

Anyway, this is a long-term nationwide trend. Murders are up in some cities, like Chicago, but in most cities America's urban violent crime rates are down radically since the early 1990s and still falling. And while falling violent crime is associated with a variety of different policies in different places, there's no one prescription you could point to. In fact, it's not clear how much of the decline is due to consciously pursued anti-crime policies at all. Nobody planned to cut the murder rate in New York, Boston or Washington by pushing real-estate prices up to the point where the socioeconomic groups more likely to commit murders could no longer afford to live there. Convincing arguments have been made that falling crime rates were caused by the legalisation of abortion and resulting decline in unwanted children. Others argue that reduced quantities of lead in the atmosphere due to the banning of leaded gasoline have played a major role, since lead stunts the parts of the brain responsible for judgment and impulse inhibition; studies have found the association between environmental lead and crime to be strong and statistically significant.

Basically, we don't entirely know why America's urban murder rate has fallen. As Philip Cohen points out, it doesn't seem to have much to do with rates of single motherhood. Beyond that, it could be several or all of dozens of different factors. What's the takeaway message? I'd say there are two of them. First of all, beware of takeaway messages! Lots of things in life, maybe most things, often the most important things, don't have explanations that can be packaged as a simple, coherent thesis. Second, given our inability to explain definitively why the crime rate is falling, we may need some scepticism about the recent push to demand scientifically valid evidence for the effectiveness of social betterment programmes. Random controlled trials might very well have found that the broken-windows strategy doesn't prevent crime, "Project Ceasefire" doesn't prevent crime, reducing rates of single motherhood doesn't prevent crime, family planning doesn't prevent crime, banning lead doesn't prevent crime, and so on and so forth; there might have been no statistically significant difference one could isolate for any of these things. And yet it seems extremely likely to me that most or all of these were good things to do! The drop in violent crime probably has to do with all of them. So we probably need to be a bit circumspect about demanding results from our cost-benefit analyses, and go ahead and do things that seem like they probably work. We ought to follow Bill and Ted's advice to be excellent to one another, even while recognising that when excellence happens, we won't necessarily know exactly why.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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IN RESPONSE to my post last week calling out Marco Rubio for equivocating on the age of the Earth, many of you noted that Barack Obama gave a similarly elusive answer when asked about the origin of the universe in 2008. So politicians will be politicians, the calmer amongst you argued, and we should give Mr Rubio a break for trying not to offend anyone.

In this case, I agree with the more vitriolic commenters who accused me of journalistic malfeasance. I was not aware of Mr Obama's comment, but he deserves the same treatment as Mr Rubio. When it is generally held that 1+1=2, our leaders should not feel comfortable saying it could also equal 3, even if it spares the feelings of an irrational group of Threeists. They need not ridicule such thinking, as Richard Dawkins might like, but they must not accede to its propagation. If there is a "legitimate debate" between "those who read the Bible literally and those who don't", as Mr Obama claims, then we need to redefine the word legitimate.

For Mr Obama, the pandering has done him little good. Those who tend to take the Bible literally have voted for his opponents in the last two elections. (Born-again and evangelical Christians went 70%-29% for Mitt Romney. And while biblical literalism and born-again/evangelical status are not identical, it is likely that literalists went for Mr Romney in numbers that were equally large, if not larger.) In some cases, they did so at the public behest of their pastors. Which brings me, in an admittedly roundabout way, to the main point of this post: America's churches have become increasingly political in very public ways.

Churches have tax-exempt status so long as they abide by certain restrictions on their political activity (laid out here), like not endorsing candidates. But this year at least 1,500 church leaders flouted those rules. In an effort called Pulpit Freedom Sunday, sponsored by the Alliance Defending Freedom (who can argue with a name like that?), pastors were urged to preach the "biblical Truth about candidates and elections". As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, "Pastors across the country have posted videos on the Internet of their direct or thinly veiled political endorsements and sent letters to the Internal Revenue Service, daring the agency to revoke their tax-exempt status for political speech."

The IRS, for its part, doesn't seem to care. After a period in the 2000s when warnings were meted out to churches endorsing candidates, the agency abruptly stopped its enforcement in 2009. This was the result of a quirky court decision. Under procedures drawn up by Congress in 1984, an IRS regional supervisor (or higher) has to sign off on any audit of a church. But in 1998, when Congress reorganised the IRS, regional supervisors were done away with. So when a church in Minnesota faced an audit in 2009, it argued that the original procedures weren't followed—that the official overseeing the audit wasn't senior enough—and a federal district court agreed. Since then, pastors have been left to preach politics as they please.

Ironically, there are pastors who would like to see the issue go before the courts, but they can't force the matter due to the IRS's inaction. They wonder how a pastor is to preach about morality without assessing the people who translate it into policy. Others, though, wonder why churches that act in overtly political ways are not taxed like other political organisations. It's more than a matter of principle. Reuters says, "Combined, federal tax breaks on donations to churches and exemptions from state and local property taxes likely add up to something on the order of $25 billion in lost revenue each year." Another estimate puts the loss at $71 billion.

Like charities, churches are seen to provide a public good, but their tax-exempt status has also been justified as a way to maintain the separation between church and state. A noble goal, but churches have increasingly involved themselves in state affairs and the state in church affairs. It therefore seems unjustified that the one place where the wall remains impenetrable is the tax code.

One solution, sometimes put forward by those opposed to Scientology's tax-exempt status, would bestow tax breaks on activities, rather than organisations (which would turn religious groups into something closer to 501(c)(4) organisations). But which activities could be said to justify a tax break by fostering a community's moral or mental improvement? Does mass count? What if it features a meaty political sermon? According to Pew, two-thirds of those who might be improved don't want houses of worship endorsing candidates.

It's a tricky issue, but religious conservatives may eventually need to take solace in the faith of their market conservative brethren. If Americans so ardently desire churches, they should be able to survive and thrive without the tax break. If they cannot, they will have indicated a dependence on government largesse—as a dollar in tax break is equal to a dollar in subsidy—and undercut their own divine status, as James Madison once argued. The pious, meanwhile, should agree that giving to a church is the right thing to do, subsidy from the satanic government or no. Render unto Caesar, and all that.

(Picture credit: Gustave Doré, via Wikimedia)

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