I'm Glad I Don't Live In Tangipahoa Parish

That's where Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell is refusing to let people of different races marry each other. In his own words, "I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way." Classic.

This is bad for everybody. But assuming that the judge is consistent about this sort of thing, the people who really have it bad are Asians, who make up 0.39% of Tangipahoa Parish's 100,000 or so residents. They've only got 195 Asians of the opposite sex to marry. Maybe an eighth of those people are around their age, leaving them with 24 or so potential partners, of whom like ten will already be married or gay or something, leaving 14 in the parish, of whom they may know three. (And who knows if Bardwell will let a Japanese dude marry an Indian girl?) Even if you don't have country fever like I do, it's a pretty bad deal.

Policy Isnt Made in a Vacuum

I'm listening to Bob Corker ask a collection of wonks whether or not a carbon tax would be a less complicated way of reducing carbon emissions. This is all very nice of him, but until Corker can convince a bunch of his Republican colleagues to draft a legitimate carbon tax proposal and promise to support it, hold the coal industry (one of his constituent interests!) at bay, and in general show that he's not just hiding behind the carbon tax so he can be for "something" while opposing the cap-and-trade-bill, he can, in the words of Dick Cheney, go fuck himself.

Lately I seem to be having conversations with wonkish right-of-center types who have this-or-that idea about how to design a simpler, more efficient, and more effective policy to deal with taxation, climate change, health care, whatever. But it always stops there. No one talks about managing the transition. No one talks about convincing Mitch McConnell to back these ideas. No one talks about sixty votes. No one talks about the interest group dynamics in Washington. No one even talks about working for a decade to elect members of Congress who might be more amenable to these sorts of policies. It's just policy in a vacuum. Which is an interesting intellectual exercise, but not a legitimate substitute for governance, an ultimately messy endeavor.

Why I Am So Chill

Matt mentions that he started freaking out over health care reform just after returning to the United States, until he realized that it was just because he had been put back in touch with cable news.

Not to get all I-don't-have-a-TV on you, but I unplugged my TV when Buffy went off the air. And then I moved to Singapore, where my apartment came furnished with two TVs that I never watch. Text is so much faster as a way of taking in information that I use it exclusively, and I find the emotional agitation of cable news overstimulating. Sometimes if there's something everyone's talking about, I'll watch it on YouTube, but that's about it.

This has resulted in me being more or less perpetually sanguine about the prospects for health care reform. Okay, during the months when Max Baucus was blocking the legislation, I got kind of annoyed. But for the most part I've spent the last few months telling Facebook friends that things will turn out okay. Write your Senator and all, but be mostly confident that it's gonna work out.

Nick has a TV, so I don't know how he does it.

Republicans Or The World? You Must Choose

A lot of smart people in America are uncomfortable with the idea that they should treat similarly educated folks from other advanced democracies as generally ignorant, deluded, or crazy on global political issues. Instead, we should treat them as what philosophers call 'epistemic peers' -- people just as intelligent as us, working from the same body of evidence, who are roughly our equals in ability to know the truth. In the case at hand, the bodies of evidence differ somewhat, since we have different news sources. But we can mostly solve this problem by sharing our evidence in discussion. If the evidence conflicts and we try to argue that their news sources are unreliable, all we usually have to go on is our news sources, and they can argue the same against us.

Similarly, a lot of smart Democrats are uncomfortable with the idea that they should regard Republicans as generally ignorant, deluded or crazy on global political issues. Many of the same considerations apply here. If we argue that their news sources are unreliable, they can argue that ours are, they're in possession of a basically isomorphic argument. Ordinarily, treating Republicans as epistemic peers would be a reasonable position, just as treating foreigners that way is. But the trouble at our historical moment is that we're no longer able to treat Republicans and educated people throughout the world as epistemic peers at the same time.

I think the following is a fair characterization of the reasoning that resulted in Obama's recent honor: The Republican Party has gone mad and become so destructive of world peace that you get a Nobel Peace Prize for removing them from power. That's an incredibly strong way to to put the point, and I don't know if the consensus of educated people outside America is willing to go quite that far. But if it stops short, it doesn't stop too far short. The 2008-2009 jump in favorable views of America, especially in Western Europe but including many other nations, is a sign of how differently people see Obama-era America from what preceded it. Foreigners will have many different views of what exactly is going on, but they're generally going to include the idea that Republican views on foreign policy are so tainted by the xenophobia, bloodthirst, and misinformation of influential people in the party that they can't be regarded as epistemic peers.

Republicans regard world opinion as badly as it regards them. You can see it even in their relationship with mainstream American opinion, where they've constructed an alternative news infrastructure in Fox News and talk radio that they regard as free from the distortions of the mainstream media. While Democrats have their own preferred blogs and websites, they haven't built full-fledged Fox-News-style alternative versions of mainstream news institutions. Globally, this becomes even stronger. Republicans' relation to respected international institutions like the UN (on the political side) and the BBC (on the news side) has long been hostile. When international weapons inspectors claimed that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, Republicans ridiculed them. Thinking the Wikipedia editors of the world are biased against them, Republicans created Conservapedia. If you don't regard educated people throughout the rest of the world as your epistemic peers, this is what you do, and maybe you start ordering freedom fries. Of course, this leaves you in a situation where the rest of the world isn't going to think you're an epistemic peer of theirs.

So where does this leave Americans who aren't Republicans? I don't think it's possible for us to treat both Republicans and educated people throughout the world as epistemic peers. This would involve having some level of trust each group's deeply held belief that the opposite group has gone totally off the rails. This leaves you suspecting that two different groups of people are deluded on the say-so of people who you suspect are deluded about issues like who is deluded. That's a pretty bad position, and not one we can stay in very long. We could also just regard global affairs as a huge area of general confusion where nobody knows what is going on, and withdraw from politics. If we're going to continue doing politics, however, we need to decide which group we're going to treat as epistemic peers and whose opinions we're going to regard as tainted by bias and misinformation.

There's plenty to be said about how exactly we should make that decision. But I'm going to conclude this post by observing that the noble intentions of Democrats and independents to treat both Republicans and educated foreigners as epistemic peers about global affairs can't be satisfied in our unhappy world. If we're going to engage in politics, we have to be either xenophobes or partisans. There are no other options.

Why Barack Obama Deserves The Nobel Peace Prize

When you look over the list of Nobel Peace Prize winners, you can mostly divide them into three categories.

First, there are those whose situation in the world could've led them to live ordinary lives under unremarkable circumstances, but found ways to accomplish great things for the betterment of humanity. In this category you have agricultural pioneer Norman Borlaug, father of microlending Mohammed Yunus, the humanitarian heroes of Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International, and Jody Williams of the International Campaign To Ban Land Mines.

Second, there are the peacemakers, who are often honored in pairs, since that's how peace is often made. Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat fit into this category for making peace between Israel and Egypt, as do John Hume and David Trimble for reconciling Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk for working towards a post-apartheid South Africa.

Third, there are those who actively participate in politics to oppose regimes destructive of human welfare. Here you have Aung San Suu Kyi who continues to fight against the brutal military dictatorship in Burma, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, Polish activist and trade unionist Lech Walesa, and anti-apartheid activist Bishop Desmond Tutu.

It's far too early in Barack Obama's presidency to see if he'll deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for the first or second reason. In nine months he hasn't had time to achieve any grand feats or make peace between long-standing enemies. The best way to see him, I think, is as a member of the third category.

America had, for a long time, been the great power that citizens of the world could best rely on to be on the right side of human rights issues. Our record was very far from perfect, and we sometimes fought brutal and foolish wars or supported horrific regimes that did horrific things. But looking at the other nations and empires in the world that have achieved the highest levels of global dominance -- most recently, the USSR, the European colonial powers, and the Axis governments -- America looks pretty good. It may strike you that these are, on the whole, horrific regimes, and being the best among such a lot is no great achievement. There may be some deep indictment of human nature in the fact that great power correlates so well with great viciousness. But as superpowers go, those are your choices. In Singapore, the general opinion I've heard attributed to policymakers is that if somebody else is going to be the big power in the neighborhood, it's better that it be America than China. Now, that's not high praise. But it's a kind of praise that really matters, both as a moral evaluation of America qua hegemon and as a sign that we're a force for good in the world.

The Iraq War, the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and Republican conduct of foreign policy showed the world an America very different from the America they knew. The Bush Administration took many hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent on human betterment, and squandered it on a destructive and ultimately pointless war that killed thousands of our citizens and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. The signs that had for so long distinguished us from our enemies -- our humane and dignified treatment of prisoners, even those who had killed Americans -- began to vanish. On issues essential to the well-being of humankind, like nuclear nonproliferation and climate change, progress either ceased or was actively reversed. And at the end of Bush's time as President, financial problems originating within our economy engulfed the world.

The idea that the Bush Administration marked the new direction America in the 21st century, a direction that future Administrations would continue to pursue, rightly struck the citizens of other nations with horror. It matters immensely that the tremendous economic and military power of the United States continue to operate at least as well, on the global scene, as it has over the past decades. I'm not really sure how to morally evaluate a superpower like America as good or bad -- there's an element of context-sensitivity to moral evaluation that I don't know how to apply in the case of gigantic political bodies that have few peers and do tremendous world-changing things. But I know very clearly what it would mean for a superpower to get worse, and to get even worse than that. People of the world were struck by the prospect of America turning into something much worse than it had been before, with terrible consequences for humanity, and they were rightly horrified by that.

Barack Obama hasn't faced the personal brutality that many of the heroes in the third category of Nobel Prize winners have. Nobody threw him in prison, tortured him, or assassinated his staffers. America's democratic traditions kept us from falling into the sort of misrule that typifies, say, the Burmese military dictatorship which Aung San Suu Kyi fights against. But while the SLORC regime in Burma is terrible for the Burmese, the global impact of America being ruled by mad people is far worse than that of Burma being ruled by mad people. The degree of one's impact is in some sense a criterion for the Nobel Prize, and that's what Obama brings to the table over and above so many other candidates. However well or badly he does in fixing the chaos that Bush left behind, the world is happy enough that he won't go around actively creating more chaos as Bush did.

The argument for giving Obama a Nobel Prize is that America is important enough and Republicans are bad enough. As much as the first part will flatter the sensibilities of our political culture, the second will seem totally beyond the pale. Well, so much the worse for our political culture. It's still wide open whether the Obama Administration will make the right decisions on Afghanistan, the Middle East, China policy, and any number of domestic issues. Many of my fellow Democrats will certainly be disappointed by the Obama Administration on any number of issues. But the sheer misrule of the Republican Party was so great that Obama deserves the Nobel Peace Prize just for his role in bringing it to an end. This will strike many in the elite center of American opinion as a partisan conclusion. If they're not willing to hear it from American Democrats, I hope they're willing to hear it from the rest of the world.

People all around the world see the difference between an America led by Obama, Biden, and the Democrats, and an America led by Bush, Cheney, and the Republicans. You can take this award as one clear and forceful expression of their preferences. I hope Obama does well enough as President to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the first and second categories of winners -- the benefactors and the peacemakers. But he already deserves it for taking executive power out of the hands of a party that was a tremendous enemy of human progress and betterment, through its control of the mightiest nation in the world. The forces in charge of the Republican Party are destructive enough that you can deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting them and winning.