Compromises II

(NOTE: This is a variant of a piece below. The two pieces diverged so far that I’m leaving both up.)

The Third Breakdown of Rationality

If there are two or more possible compromises, of which the one most favored by player 1 is not the one most favored by player 2; then to choose a sure-thing strategy is to be a sucker that capitulates entirely to the other side.

Nigel Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality, MIT, 1969, p. 181

Always explain to your adversary exactly what’s at stake, because that’s the only way that you can be sure that you understand things better than he does.

Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo (de Zoete translation, paraphrased by me), Vintage, 1930/1958, p.89.

You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run

Kenny Rogers

“Shut up!”, he explained.

Ring Larder

Our friends have been explaining things to us ever so kindly during the last few days:  “Don’t let the best be the enemy of the good”, “politics is the art of the possible”, “politics is the art of compromise”, and just recently “We must obey he ethic of responsibility”.

Nigel Howard explains a different political principle: don’t be a sucker. Suppose that you’re planning an auction, and someone comes up and offers to save you the bother by giving you a lump sum for the lot. Should you take his offer? After all, it’s money in the hand, and if you go ahead and hold the auction you might not sell anything, or might not get good bids…. just take the offer. Right?

Wrong. If he’s a sharp guy, you’re better off with the auction. Furthermore, if you take his offer he’ll make similar offers every time, except that the offers will be successively worse, since he knows that you think auctions are a nuisance and that you don’t know how much your stuff is really worth.

This isn’t about purism vs. compromise, as many on both sides seem to think. In the end you’re going to get a compromise. This is about fighting for the best compromise.

But playing the game involves risk. In the example I just gave, over a run of auctions you’re going to come out ahead, but now and then it will happen that you would have been better off with the easy deal. If you play, sometimes you lose, but if you don’t play, in the end you lose more. For at least the last twenty years, Democratic negotiations have been defined from the start as finding the middle, with the progressive positions surrendered even before bargaining begins.

This leads to a second question: who are we bargaining with? Well, we’re not bargaining with the Republicans or the conservative Democrats — our representatives are in Congress to do that. We don’t have to figure out how to handle Joe Lieberman or Olympia Snowe or Ben Nelson or any of the other boodlers and rightwingers stinking up Congress. We’re bargaining with our own representatives in Congress, not the other side’s representatives.  And in practice this means that we’re bargaining with the progressives in Congress, the Democratic leadership, and Barack Obama (as represented by Rahm Emmanuel).

We obviously shouldn’t take bargaining tips from the people we’re bargaining with. Progressive bargaining with the Democratic Party has been stuck at the “Shut up!” level for a good long time, and Obama (in the person of Rahm Emmanuel) has not changed that.

Centrists are always assuring us that they’re really on our side but are continually forced to compromise by the political realities. This is not true, however. Centrists are committed to centrism — some for ideological reasons, some for corrupt reasons, and most for both reasons. Along with the Republicans we are one of their two main adversaries, and we shouldn’t be too sure that they’ll side with us at crunch time. Beating us is one of their primary goals.

Democratic pros and Republican demagogues tend to speak of progressives  and intellectuals as tiny, effete, inconsequential minorities, but that’s just bullying. Progressives comprise about 15-20% of the population, and their share of the actual voters is bigger than that. College graduates make up 28% of the population,  post-graduate degree-holders 10%, and these two demographics are the most likely of all to vote. The Democrats can’t win without intellectuals and progressives, but they don’t want to give us much, and that’s why we are continually having these dog-and-pony-show debates about purism and realism and moral seriousness and the ethic of responsibility and so on.

This post hasn’t really been about the health care debate, but it applies. We should play the game to the end, and make our choices piecemeal as we go along. And remember — anything less than Medicare for all counts as a compromise.

*P.S. I am often regarded as advocating anti-intellectualism, but that’s not quite right. I do think that the preponderance of the educated in the Democratic Party has had some negative effects, and I think that intellectuals in politics make far too much of their own superior intelligence. But my main message is an inclusive one. I’m mostly just asking the intelligentsia to realize that they are People too, and inviting them to come on down to join the rest of the dispossessed peasantry. A lot of adjuncts and grad students are already here.

 

Fun Philosophy Question

This is a mental experiment. Do not try it at home.

Suppose that the hundred members of the present U.S. Senate were trapped on a desert island with a man-eating dragon and only you could save them. In which order would you save them, and how many would you save before you decided to quit?

I’d save six right off and then think about the next eleven. After eighteen at the most, I’d just sit in my boat and watch the dragon movie.

NOTE:  Man-eating dragons define the word “man” in the old-fashioned male chauvinist way….. laydeez. Also, John Kerry just got himself kicked off the boat.

 

Ygelesias cleans up his shithole

Matt Yglesias’s comments section has been a fratboy shithole for years, and all that time I’ve been suggesting that he monitor them. Apparently he finally listened to me, so I won’t need to be commenting there any more. Unfogged, Crooked Timber, Yglesias, The Valve…. only DeLong remains.

 

Fight for the best compromise

The Third  Breakdown of Rationality

If there are two or more possible compromises, of which the one most favored by player 1 is not the one most favored by player 2; then to choose a sure-thing strategy is to be a sucker that capitulates entirely to the other side.

Nigel Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality, MIT, 1969, p. 181

In discussion of healthcare negotiating strategies at Yglesias’s site, the whole “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good” / “politics is the art of the possible” / “politics is the art of compromise” meme  came up another god damn time.

Democrats and liberals have learned that lesson far too well, but they seem to have forgotten the other set of lessons: don’t make your final offer at the beginning of negotiations, and don’t let the other guy know how desperate you are to make a deal.

Politics is the art of compromise and the art of the possible, but it’s also the art of fighting for the best compromise and the best possible. Democrats never fight and Republicans also do, and for that reason Republicans can dominate with tiny majorities and Democrats lose with 60 Senators.

Gingrich lost a lot of fights on his way up, and he kept coming back. In other words, he was thinking of the future and had a long-term strategy. The Democrats don’t. It’s always “the best we can get right now”.

I’m always hearing Democratic wonks saying “We know we’re not going to get that, so why even talk about it?”  The fact is, you never know how a game will turn out until after the game has been played. You don’t know how much the other guy knows, and he’s not going to let you know what his weak spots are. Smart people who try to figure out the final score in advance are really dumb people. The little tastes of social science that they’ve had in school tend to make the wonk demographic think that they know what’s going on and how things will turn out, but they’re just fooling themselves.

I’ve been arguing for some time that the heavy influence of the highly educated on the Democratic Party has been harmful. One of the most harmful aspects of this domination is a trained incapacity at dealing with situations where where bargaining, bluffing, bullying, and and deception are required. I’ve never been in the business world, but from friends I have I understand that big-time negotiations are feints,  bluffs, and bullying all the way to the end, with the two parties fighting for every nickel and every dime right until the pens come out — not a gentlemanly search for a consensus fair to both parties. And that’s how the Republicans play.

P. S. My leftist friends explain to me that this is all silly, and that the Democrats are just corrupt. Yeah, a lot of the big-time Democrats are corrupt, and those Democrats certainly do know how to play hardball. But there are a lot of Democrats who aren’t in on the take,   and far too often they end up surrendering to the hard bargainers without even knowing what they’ve done. And one way the tough-minded realists befuddle these nice idealistic Democrats is by telling them, over and over again,  that politics is the art of the possible, but never cluing them in that anyone who chooses the sure-thing strategy is a sucker.

The Democrats have to learn to fight the Republicans, and we have to learn how to fight the Democrats.

 

Thanks for Nothing!

Attaturk asks

“So tell us, this day of all days, those things you are not thankful for.”

I’ve never seen what the problem is with cursing the darkness, so this is right down my alley. Fuck you, darkness!

He goes on to say

“I’m not very thankful that several major news organizations are run by a gaggle of wankers, who will lie, smear, and deceive many people, including some of the ones I’ll be stuck with today”.

This cues one of my stock sermons: the word “wankers” is not strong enough and misses an important point. People like Dowd and Stephanopolous and Mika and Matthews and Cokie are just doing their jobs. They were hired to wank.  Ashleigh Banfield, for example, was completely mainstream and had all the skills of a TV journalist, but she was a Canadian unfamiliar with American wank culture, and because of a single commonsensical true statement  that she made on the air about Fox News, her career came to a screeching halt. This example could be multiplied indefinitely; even Dan Rather was not wanky enough for American TV, and that’s saying something.

By contrast, Hannity, Dobb, Limbaugh, Beck, and O’Reilly are not wankers.  They’re deliberate malefactors. They are actively malevolent and have devoted themselves to the dissemination of disinformation and viciousness.

I’ve been saying this all along and have convinced nobody, but the problem is at the upper levels and seems unlikely to go away. Everybody agrees that Murdoch, Scaife, and Rev. Moon are evil forces, but none of the other owners are significantly better. The network and cable bosses get less flak than Murdoch et. al. because they’re faceless, but they are also actively sabotaging American democracy.  And Graham at the Post and Sulzburger at the Times have also bought into the center-right agenda: they want low taxes (especially inheritance taxes), a permanent state of war, and the weakening or dismantling of the welfare state, and in the end they will be happy to get these with the help of an authoritarian, anti-popular government.

These are the real issues of our time; many feel otherwise, but many are wrong.

Bill Moyer and three people at MSNBC are almost the only strong liberals in the major broadcast media, if you call PBS major, but Moyers is only on once a week. The Times and Post have a few good people, but most of their supposed liberals, except for Krugman, are feeble. Krugman writes strongly, but he’s not left; he belongs to the right, NAFTA wing of the Democratic Party.

The center-right / right domination of the big media isn’t absolute, but it’s overwhelming. Krugman and Olbermann were probably hiring mistakes (Olberman is an ex-sportswriter, and Krugman was a NAFTA cheerleader and Nader-hater) and Moyer is an eminent relic of better days who they’d really like to squeeze out. Before 2003 when Olbermann came on there was literally nothing to watch on major TV or cable, and Olbermann himself is only very mildly center left. The leftmost 20-30% or so of the political spectrum is still pretty much unrepresented (maybe Ed Schultz counts), whereas the rightmost 20% gets at least its share of air time.

The ambient politics of America — the politics you pick up if you’re not paying attention — is far right. Without rightwing media saturation the Bush-Rove-Gingrich-Delay team could never have controlled American politics the way they did 1994-2006.

What to do? A lot of progressive media criticism reminds me of Russian peasants trying to get past the Czar’s evil ministers. “If only our little father czar knew of our troubles, then he could help us”. It doesn’t work that way. Under present management, things will never improve much. At the moment, the media seem to be favoring Obama over Palin, though just barely. But that’s a tiny victory, and it only happened because Obama has proven to be their kind of guy, and not ours.

To my knowledge no radical, dissident, or reform movement has ever had any success while relying on the already-existing media. The blogosphere has been a beginning, but my guess is that it doesn’t reach more than 20% of the electorate.  As long as the majority of people get their news from the present radio, TV, and cable sources (and the major newspapers we have today), we will continue to lose.

 

Evangelical Christian Pyramid Scam

I don’t usually do topical stuff but this one is too good to pass up.

Minnesota’s current big scandal is the Tom Petters pyramid scam. A major player in the scandal was an ex-con, professional criminal, and evangelical preacher named Frank Vennes:

Janet Leck, 79, said she and her late husband met another Petters investor, Frank Vennes Jr., in the mid-1980s when they helped arrange religious retreats in prisons through a nonprofit entity called Charis Ministries. Vennes was in the Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution on money-laundering, drug and firearm charges at the time.

Vennes became an evangelist in prison and after he got out, steered unwitting investors to the Wayzata businessman. On his advice, investors, including faith-based organizations, put $1.2 billion into the hands of Petters and the company he controlled, Petters Co. Inc. For his work, Vennes, 52, allegedly collected commissions totaling $28 million, according to government documents.

Vennes traces his redemption to an interview with a Christian prison visitor who taught him gratitude:

That was more than a dozen years ago, and now Vennes’ story resembles that of Joseph, who was brought out of prison and placed in a position of influence. He now manages his own multi-million dollar company, financing accounts receivable. As the business prospered, he and his wife sought direction from God on where they should place the money He had entrusted to them. Faith Studies International was one of the answers. “I could put it in human terms,” says Vennes. “It’s an extremely effective ministry with verifiable results. They use the money wisely and efficiently. But what it really comes down to is following God’s leading—and He pointed us to Faith Studies.”

If you should care to support Frank Vennes’s work, Faith Studies International can be found here.

Watchdog report on Faith Studies International: Five Stars

Michelle Bachmann and Frank Vennes

Norm Coleman too (remember him?)

 

“One is almost forced to the conclusion that to be economically sound, a man has to be an idiot’

Senator King (1933):
“I suggest to the Senator from Minnesota, in the form of a question, if he is not becoming heterodox?”
.
Senator Shipstead:
“I have seen the dire results of orthodox policies pursued here. We have pursued policies here for the past fifteen years which have been guaranteed to be orthodox, and we see the results, the dire results. Within the past two years we have been called upon to vote for orthodox policies to stop the depression. I have voted against every one of them, because I did not consider that they would have any effect on the depression at all except to increase its intensity and postpone the final day of reckoning. So, I have no apology to make. One is almost forced to the conclusion that to be economically sound, a man has to be an idiot.”

So the orthodox-heterodox split is at least 76 years old, even though the orthodoxy and the heterodoxy have both changed. What is constant is the recognition of the essentially theological nature of the field.

P.S. Shipstead was a New Dealer from the radical Minnesota Farmer Labor Party. The proposals he’d been opposing were Hoover’s.

 

Eliot Spitzer claims that 2 + 2 = 4. Most Democrats disagree.

Imagine this: by next spring, an intellectual consensus will have emerged that the concentration in the banking sector that developed from the 1980s until the crash of ‘08 was misguided. Voices as disparate as Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, meta- investor George Soros, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page will be in agreement on this point.

A few brave souls on the Right — recognizing that the Republican Party has been bereft of ideas in its attacks on President Obama — will then try to re-define a populist, conservative attack by asserting that the White House has been captured by Wall Street. Real populism and change, they will argue, will come from the Republican, not the Democratic, party…..

So the simple question remains: why aren’t we focusing on the problem that got us here in the first instance — the scope, range, and size of the mega-institutions whose risk taking has so far inflicted only enormous harm on our economy? If the Republicans pick up this issue before we do, the elections of 2010 could be even worse than we are now fearing.

Other Democrats say that if we shut our eyes and think happy thoughts, everything will turn out beautifully. Above all, they say, “we cannot allow ourselves to become like them. If the Republicans decide to behave despicably, we should let them hang themselves with their own rope. The American people know that populists are nothing but demagogues and charlatans.”

Who is right and who is wrong? It’s too early to be sure, and the truth is probably somewhere between the two extremes.

 

The Ivy Tweeds

If populism is defined as “building mass-support for meaningful policies”, then why would anyone be against it?

I don’t think that anyone has defined it that way. I think the populist idea is that good political ideas can come from below, from unsanctioned, unofficial, uncredentialed oppositional groups. The Democratic Party leadership does not believe this.

Populism involves some degree of breaking down the barriers between citizens and government. The Constitution was designed to suppress direct democracy in favor of representative democracy via checks and balances, the separation of powers, federalism, and the other stuff you learned about in eighth grade civics. The two-party system puts another intermediary in there, the party, and usually the parties and the candidates work through still another layer of vote-contracting intermediaries, the organized interest groups and the mass media. Populists want to get rid of some of those layers. (Populists are sometimes portrayed as Jeffersonian constitutionalists, but they generally advocated more simplified procedures and spent a lot of time fighting the Supreme Court, and that interpretation is incomplete at best.).

When elitist liberals or socialists get upset upon finding that their representatives are lying and unresponsive, they’re populists whether they know it or not. Elitism is institutional, not intellectual. To a political player, a Nobelist is one vote, the way a HS dropout is one vote, and a famous Nobelist is an opinion-leader, on a par with a comparably famous stoner celebrity (and far outranked by a really serious opinion-leader like Bill Kristol.)

The difference is that when they’re lied to, populists know what’s happening and get mad, whereas left intellectuals are baffled and mostly just whine. My mission in this world is to convince liberal intellectuals that they are People too, salt-of-the-earth folk scorned by the powers that be. But most intellectuals find this offensive — they think of themselves as unappreciated elite units, like princes switched in the cradle and raised by peasants. They’re sure that some day they will be recognized and restored to their rightful status.

Our political elite is well-educated but tough-minded. The Democratic Party’s pious renunciation of ideology, populism, and demagoguery has been accompanied by a rehabilitation of graft, corruption, and subservience to big money. (The post-WWII pluralists and consensus theorists were fairly open about this). What we have now is a spiffy, modern, Ivy-educated Tweed Ring*. And Boss Tweed and the others, when the chips were down, were reactionary servants of big money (“Bourbon Democrats“.) They used part of the graft to help out their voters, but they supported policies which hurt these same voters), and they made sure that whatever help the voters got was controlled by vote-contractors and received only by reliable supporters.

The suffering PhD masses have nothing to lose but their chains, but they’re mired in the toils of servility and ancient prejudice. An unpromising lot indeed, but be they ever so humble, we cannot afford to write off even the least of our brethren.

* The Moonies have Ivy-educated leadership now. The Mafia and the drug cartels send their kids to the best schools. Ahmed Chalibi, Ted Kaczynski, Jerome Corsi, Bill Kristol — all PhDs from the best schools. We humble folk just don’t know what to think.

 

Zombies Walk Among Us

The zombie “fiscal conservatism” slogan will never die, even though the ones who use it most (Reagan, Dubya) always blatantly cheat when the chips are down. It’s true that if your personal income goes down you should make cuts in your household budget, but that isn’t a national fiscal plan.

FDR campaigned as a fiscal conservative and had to be bullied into mild Keynesianism, and he almost destroyed his Presidency by returning to fiscal conservativism in 1937. Conservatives say that the New Deal didn’t end the depression, WWII did, and they’re right; but when they say that they’re conceding Keynesian economics. Roosevelt only went really Keynesian after the war started.

Unfortunately, Obama started off deep in the hole, since Dubya had already deliberately ballooned the national debt with non-Keynesian spending. The Republicans are authoritarians rather than anarchists, but their governing philosophy is sabotage. They don’t want a stateless society, they want a crippled state. Look at California.

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