Rumors of the Nordic Nanny State's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Spend enough times reading left blogs, and you will here folks extolling the virtues of the "Nordic" model of the welfare state of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and Finland, in contrast to either the "Continental" model of Germany and France, or the "Anglo" model of the UK and Canada. Purportedly, the Nordic countries feature an economic model that combines flexibility—relatively light business regulations, less emphasis on employment guarantees in union contracts—with the security of a generous, high-quality welfare state. It seems tempting.

Except that there's actually plenty of business regulation in Nordic countries. For instance, EA Sports UFC MMA won't be sold in Denmark. Why? Because the arena artwork features advertisements for Rockstar energy drinks, and the country has a blanket prohibition on their marketing. In the current legal climate the U.S., such a ban would last approximately eight seconds. So we have a long way to go before we reach our Nordic utopian future.

The Future Looks Murkowski

What's struck me about the primary defeats of Bob Bennett in Utah and (apparently) Lisa Murkowski in Alaska is how they seem to have just come out of nowhere. I wonder how Republicans in DC are responding to this. The obvious move is to do whatever crazy stuff the GOP base wants so that they'll be happy, but as far as I know Murkowski and Bennett basically thought they were doing fine up until they suddenly lost primaries (or in Bennett's case, nominating convention votes) that they completely expected to win. So I guess pandering to the Tea Party will be combined with a new awareness that you might not really know what your base thinks of you until too late, and you've got to pay more attention or be kind of entrepreneurial in doing your own ridiculousness.

Apparently it'll be tough for Murkowski to get a third party shot. I really don't know which set of potential outcomes gives Democrats the best chance at the seat, but our chances are going to be pretty slim in any case. Things probably depend on some really absurd revelation about the Tea Party guy. Alaska voters will put up with Republicans who do really weird stuff, but Alaska politicians are likely to be especially far off the deep end, so we'll see what happens. The Democrat seems to be okay -- he's mayor of a town with 9000 people (the fifth-biggest town in Alaska) so it's not like he's Alvin Greene. I think his facial hair is a bit odd though.

Looking at all this, I wonder if an Arlen Specter primary victory would've been better for the national Democratic party, in that it'd make Republican Senators think better of the party-switching option in the future if staying on the GOP side gets too hot to handle. I'm pretty sure Specter would've lost in November, given that Toomey has a solid lead on Sestak. The indignity of losing in the other party's primary has to be worse than a November loss in a wave election, though.

Australia's Hung Parliament

Australian elections have resulted in a hung parliament. As far as I can tell, Labor has 72 votes and their opponents have 73. You need 76 for outright control of the chamber. These people are the remaining five votes. The Green dude and the guy who resigned over the Iraq War go Labour. The guy with retrograde climate change views goes for Abbott. So we're at 74-74.

That leaves the guy who made a promise to vote for whoever had the most votes and the most seats, and it looks like that'll pull in two different directions. He and his moderate-seeming friend seem to be the real kingmakers. I don't have a good enough grasp on the situation to know which way they'll go. Anyway, I think they're still counting votes in Western Australia, so we'll see what happens.

Reporting on the 60-vote Senate

News outlets really need to issue some style guidelines when it comes to this stuff:

Obama added that Republican opposition to the bill, which failed to pass by a 58-42 margin at the end of July, "defies common sense," asserting that the bill incorporated both Republican and Democratic ideas.

If you're not a political junkie, you might think that only 42 Senators voted for the bill, and thus might be confused as to why they put the number 58 first, since usually the first number is the number of votes for something. But of course, 58 Senators, a clear majority of the body representing a clear majority of the American public, voted for the bill. All Democrats voted for the bill except Harry Reid, who voted against it for procedural reasons. There ought to be some quick-and-easy way to convey to readers what's going on here, but this isn't doing the job. In the meantime, the Republican minority will continue to stymie the government's ability to respond to anything and reap the political benefits.

Iraq Navel-Gazing

I haven't discussed my early thinking about the Iraq War very much here. My story isn't the pundit one where I was wrong, but the ordinary person one where I wasn't paying enough attention to politics. 2001-2003 were unusually apolitical years in my life, as I was engrossed in the first two years of philosophy grad school and didn't think about a whole lot else. (Being at Harvard from 1997-2001 where the enemy was nowhere nearby also took a lot of steam out of my political interests. High school in North Carolina back in the Jesse Helms days was really where my political interests grew.)

I was dubious of the venture and on balance thought it was a bad idea for War or Car reasons -- this was going to cost a lot more money than it would probably be worth. But there was the remote possibility that Saddam had a nuclear bomb. I liked the idea of giving Iraqis a stable liberal democracy, but I thought Bush would screw it up (I've now realized that nobody could do it.) But I didn't really get involved.

I was thinking of this when I read Matt's "Why I was wrong about the war back in late 2002-early 2003" post:

it was clear to me that something was badly amiss as soon as Bush/Blair/Aznar pulled the plug on the inspections process. By a couple of months later, it seemed pretty clear that there was no scary WMD program and also that there was no real for what to do.

(There's a word left out of that last sentence, but somehow it leaves the meaning intact.) In a different way, this was a big event for me too. It made me freak out about how foreign policy was being made and pay more attention. I started reading blogs -- Matt's thing was one of the first. I thought about joining up with Dean, but the polling and my general picture of politics suggested that John Edwards was the most plausible instrument of Bush removal, so I joined that team instead, and got interested enough to start this blogging thing in mid-2004.