A Thinking Reed

Category: Politics

  • Our farm policy: bad for animals, bad for the environment, bad for the poor, bad for our waistlines…

    Michael Pollan writes about how US farm policy keeps the prices of fattening and unhealthy foods artificially low, while allowing prices on things like fruits and vegetables to rise. Why, he asks, would we want to encourage such a situation, especially if we face an “epidemic” of obesity?

    He also points out how this connects to a variety of social and environmental ill: subsidized grain helps make industrial meat production possible (by substituting corn-based feed for more natual grass), artificially low prices provide unfair competition to impoverished foreign growers, it affects the health of the soil by promoting “chemical and feedlot agriculture,” and so on.

    His contention is that farm policy needs to be reworked with the interests of eaters in mind, not just the interests of big producers from a handful of agricultural states. “[M]ost of us assume that, true to its name, the farm bill is about “farming,” an increasingly quaint activity that involves no one we know and in which few of us think we have a stake. This leaves our own representatives free to ignore the farm bill, to treat it as a parochial piece of legislation affecting a handful of their Midwestern colleagues.”

    Since the status quo is far from being the inevitable outworkings of a free market, Pollan suggests that food policy be reworked to “encourage farmers to focus on taking care of the land rather than all-out production, on growing real food for eaters rather than industrial raw materials for food processors and on rebuilding local food economies” and “to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity.”

  • PBA ban

    While I’m in sympathy with the spirit of such a law, I’m a bit skeptical of the logic. After all, the point is to ban a certain procedure, rather than to, say, ban all abortions after a particular point of development. It’s hard to see why it’s not ok to kill an unborn child by means of this particular procedure, but ok otherwise (indeed, part of the Court’s rationale for letting the law stand was that there are always alternative procedures available).

    It seems to me that it’s coherent to hold that human life should be protected from conception onwards, or to hold that the fetus/unborn child comes to merit greater degrees of protection over the course of pregnancy. But it’s harder, I think, to make a coherent case for selectively disallowing certain ways of killing the unborn child while allowing others at the very same stage of pregnancy.

  • Current ATR candidate rankings (subject to change at my whim)

    Here are my current (extremely lukewarm) preferences for presidential candidates in both parties, confining myself to the declared major candidates*, from most to least preferred:

    Dems:

    1. Richardson
    2. Edwards
    3. Obama
    4. Clinton

    GOP:

    1. Romney
    2. McCain
    3. Guliani

    At this point none of the GOP candidates rise close enough to the level of sanity on foreign policy for me to consider voting for them in a general election, but Romney strikes me as the most rational. Or, at least, he’s demonstrated a certain … flexibility, which leads me to think that he would be more likely to bend with the prevailing wind on Iraq, etc. Contrast this to McCain’s rather frightening “Damn the torpedoes!” approach.

    As for the Dems I would consider pulling the lever for Richardson, Edwards, and Obama, but probably not Clinton. Richardson has made what I regard as some very good statements on Iraq and has an overall foreign policy savvy that seems both realistic and constrained. Edwards has said some good things, though I’m not completely sold. Obama is still a bit of a cipher in my view, and I’m not convinced he’s had enough experience for the job. HRC is an unapologetic war-hawk and executive power aficionado, so I feel no pull whatsoever to vote for her.

    So, given the above, if on election day it comes down to either Richardson, Edwards, or (possibly) Obama vs. any of the three above Republicans, I would probably vote Dem. If it ends up being HRC, I will almost certainly vote third-party.

    This all assumes that no other serious contenders (Hagel, Gore) jump in to complicate matters.
    —————————————————–
    *I admit the possibility that Huckabee, Tommy and/or Fred Thompson, and Brownback could potentially become major contenders, so their exclusion is somewhat artificial; Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, God bless their peacenik hearts, don’t stand a chance.

  • Preemption, prevention, and the Pope

    Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus have both offered some critical comments on Pope Benedict’s Easter address where Benedict reiterated (by implication, at least) some of his criticisms of the Iraq war. Novak has consistently remained a steadfast supporter of President Bush, so his comments aren’t particularly novel or surprising; he offers the now-cliched rebuttal that the Pope, much like the “American Left” is ignoring all the “good news” coming out of Iraq.

    Neuhaus, by contrast, has expressed at least some misgivings about the war over the last several months, but here tries to get the Bush Administration off the hook for its embrace of “preventive war,” which, as numerous theologians, including the Pope himself, have pointed out, is incompatible with Catholic teaching on Just War:

    Talk about preemptive war was part of the Bush administration’s less than careful (others would say arrogant) strategic language, most assertively expressed in the statement on national security of September 2002. Language about preemptive war was provocative and entirely unnecessary. As George Weigel has explained (here and here) in the pages of First Things, traditional just-war doctrine adequately provides for the use of military force in the face of a clear and present threat of aggression. Such a use of force is more accurately described as defensive rather than preemptive, and it is worth keeping in mind that in 2003 all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war.

    There needs to be a distinction made between “preemptive” war and “preventive” war. Fr. Neuhaus is correct that preemption is allowed for in Just War thinking. If a country is facing an imminent threat it needn’t wait for the other side to attack before engaging in defensive action. The textbook (literally) example of this is Israel’s preemptive attack which began the Six Day War.

    But “preventive” war refers to initiating hostilities when the threat is only hypothetical. Daniel Larison dissects some of the problems with this concept here, but it is to say the least far harder to justify according to traditional Just War criteria.

    Fr. Neuhaus, unfortunately, seems to be engaging in a bit of sleight-of-hand here when he talks about the supposed threat from Iraq as “clear and present threat of aggression” and says that “all the countries with developed intelligence services agreed that Saddam Hussein had or was quickly developing weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in aggressive war.” The “threat” posed by Hussein’s regime was always a very hypothetical one, relying on a chain of inferences involving its possession of WMDs, its alleged ties to al-Qaeda (always the weakest of the Administration’s arguments), and the claim that it couldn’t be deterred from launching what would appear to be a suicidal attack on the U.S. via these terrorist proxies. Even Administration spokesmen shied away from describing this “threat” as “imminent.” In fact, President Bush himself in his 2003 State of the Union address said:

    Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.

    In fact, after it became clear that the threat from Saddam’s Iraq was largely illusory, there was a concerted effort by Administration spokesmen to deny that they ever claimed that the threat was “imminent.”

    Now, it’s open to the defender of preventive war to argue that a threat needn’t be imminent for war to be justified, but that would represent a serious departure from the Just War tradition; to mention only one problem it’s very difficult to see how preventive war could be reconciled with the criterion of “last resort.” But, if so, it should at least be admitted that it is a departure. Either the Administration was claiming that that the threat from Saddam was imminent, in which case it was either wrong or dissembling, or it was not claiming the threat was imminent, in which case it went to war in contravention of accepted Just War principles.

  • The “hegemonist consensus”

    Good article from Jim Pinkerton about how little evidence there is that Chuck Hagel, despite his criticisms of the Bush administration, would dissent from what Pinkerton calls the “hegemonist consensus” shared by elites of both parties. Only “fringe” candidates like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich seem willing to question this consensus.

    That said, Hagel certainly looks better to my eyes than any of the current GOP candidates, but it’s not even clear he’s going to run (and even less clear that he’d have a shot at the nomination). Given that, I’m inclined to root for the Dem candidate who stands the best chance of at least ameliorating the situation in Iraq and exercising some degree of executive restraint in the future, both at home and abroad.

  • It’s the national security state, stupid

    Andrew Bacevich, reviewing several new books on the presidency, contends that the Imperial Presidency is a symptom, not the cause of our current troubles. The underlying problem is the state of permanent semi-mobilization that the country entered into after World War II and the attendant national security apparatus that it gave rise to. In matters of foreign policy and warmaking the president, Bacevich argues, has become more beholden to the various institutions within the national security state that act as quasi-independent centers of power and less beholden to the people.

    In short, as the atmosphere of semiwar took hold in the later 1940s, the formulation of national security policy became less democratic, but it did not become less political. It’s just that politics became an insider’s game, shielded from public scrutiny; henceforth, the politicking that counted occurred within the presidency behind closed doors. Keeping the Joint Chiefs on board became more important than gaining the assent of Congress. Maintaining a consensus among the various entities represented on the National Security Council took precedence over attending to what was once called the common good.

    If that’s right, then simply changing the current occupant of the Oval Office (however desirable that might be) will do little to restore democratic accountability to the conduct of foreign policy. Some kind of structural or constitutional change would be necessary, maybe along the lines of the Ludlow Amendment proposed in the late 30s to require a national referendum on any declaration of war except in cases where the U.S. had been attacked. Of course, the Ludlow Amendment applied to Congress, whereas nowadays presidents regard congressional authorization for war as a formality at best. But something in the same spirit might be one way of restoring some kind of check on the autonomy of executive branch, however unlikely such a thing is.

  • Respect for life as a communal value

    In yesterday’s Boston Globe, Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel accused President Bush of moral inconsistency with respect to the President’s position on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). According to Sandel, if Bush regards the destruction of embryos as tantamount to killing a full-grown person, then he ought logically call for a total ban on ESCR, since it would be morally equivalent to murder.

    I think there are two problems with Sandel’s argument. First, it assumes that pro-lifers can never engage in piecemeal, pragmatic politics or compromise. Many pro-lifers would like to see abortion banned, but in the interim they’re also quite happy to see policies that limit abortion enacted such as bans on federal funding of abortion, parental notification laws, bans on partial-birth abortion, etc. Bush could well be following a similar tactic, recognizing that a ban on ESCR has no chance of being enacted.

    The second problem, though, is that Sandel doesn’t address the possibility that one can oppose the destruction of embryos for scientific research without conceding that an embryo is morally equivalent to a full-grown person. This isn’t dispositive, but I imagine that most of us, if faced with the choice between rescuing a child from a burning building or a dish with fertilized ova in it, would have no problem deciding to save the child. This suggests that we don’t regard embryos as morally equivalent to human persons.

    But it doesn’t follow from this that embryos have no value, or that it’s unproblematic to use them as raw materials for research. There are several objections one might make to this practice that don’t rely on the supposition that an embryo is morally equivalent to a human person. One is that the use of embryos in research is another step on the road of regarding all of nature and life as a “resource” to be used for our benefit. This denies their intrinsic value and makes human utility the measure of all things. To draw a line and say that certain things mustn’t be done to embryos is a way of affirming the intrinsic value of nascent human life.

    It’s very difficult to make these kinds of arguments in a political culture based on concerns of utility or on rights, since embryos don’t seem at first blush like the sorts of entities that can have their utility diminished or their rights violated. But it’s noteworthy that Sandel, a noted communitarian thinker who has criticized “procedural liberalism”, wouldn’t be more sensitive to ethical concerns that go beyond this rather narrow set of concerns. A polity might, on communitarian grounds, affirm its respect for life by making certain kinds of research off limits. Of course, Bush hasn’t generally made his case in these terms, and one can question whether such a policy reflects the values of our polity considering that it has been maintained only by presidential veto. Still, I would think that Sandel would recognize that such a case could be made since it’s more congenial to his approach to political philosophy.

  • Sovereignty, intervention, and self-interest

    Russell Arben Fox points us to a debate between scholar Michael Berube and what he calls “the Z Magazine/Counterpunch Left.” In a nutshell, the Z/CP crowd, notably iconclastic leftist crank Alexander Cockburn (and I say that affectionately as someone who enjoys Cockburn’s writing), accuses Berube and other left-liberals of being insufficiently pure in their devotion to anti-interventionism, while Berube charges the Z/CPers with making a fetish out of national soveriegnty (e.g. in their opposition to the wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan in addition to the Iraq war; Berube opposed the Iraq war but supported the other two) and dubs them “the Sovereignty Left.” The point being, I take it, that it’s odd for leftists, who are supposed to be internationalists, to elevate the principle of national sovereignty to some kind of absolute, especially considering that most actually existing nation-states are controlled by the kinds of pernicious elites that leftism purportedly stands against. Meanwhile, the Z/CP-style response is that they’re not “pro-sovereignty” so much as they’re anti-imperialist. It has all the classic features of a intra-sectarian left-wing ideological battle. Russell also adds his own thoughts on the whole kerfuffle.

    Now, interesting as this all is, I have to say there is a certain surreal quality to this debate. What you have is various species of left-winger arguing about how best the U.S. government can serve the interests of foreigners in faraway lands. Should we leave them alone or selectively intervene to protect human rights? In the whole debate there is little or no discussion of the interests of Americans.

    I speculate that this is part of the reason that a lot of leftish ideas never gain any traction with most Americans. Polls consistently show that many Americans favor left-of-center policies, especially on economic issues, but if left-wing intellectuals frame their policies in terms of benefitting humanity at large rather than their fellow citizens, it’s only natural that most people, who, after all, think most about the well-being of themselves and their families, their communities, and their own country and certainly put it ahead of the interests of the citizens of other countries, will tune them out. Right or wrong, most people seem to exist within concentric circles of concern that diminish in intensity the farther they get from kith and kin.

    There was, to my mind, a perfectly good case agains the Iraq war that took American self-interest as the primary, if not sole, criterion: there was no demostrable or imminent threat from Iraq; the consequences of going to war were unpredictable; we had our hands full with the pursuit of al-Qaeda, etc. A variation on the same could be said about most of the USA’s other military interventions over the years. The bar for spending one’s own blood treasure ought, logically, to be high. This doesn’t mean that moral concerns aren’t also important, but if you don’t even reach the bar of self-interest then there’s no need to worry about the moral veto on your proposed action.

    And I personally think there are good reasons, at least at the national level, to take this kind of broadly self-interested view combined with what I would call moral side constraints on how we can treat others. To put it another way, what philosophers call “positive duties” are largely concerned with obligations to kith and kin, while “negative duties” (e.g. do no harm) extend to everybody. So, it’s entirely proper that a nation’s foreign policy be conducted primarily with the aim of protecting its own citizens, as long as in so doing it doesn’t inflict injustice on others. Some liberals and leftists have a hard time making peace with this idea, since it flies in the face of universalist and cosmopolitan tendencies that are deeply rooted in those outlooks (though more among intellectuals than actual politicians, most of whom tend to be unabashedly nationalist). But whether or not it’s a morally correct position, it’s important to recognize that it’s one that many, perhaps most, Americans hold. (It’s worth pointing out that there’s a species of internationalist universalism among some neoconservatives on the right that seems just as out of touch with sound patriotic concern for the well-being of one’s own country.)

    My point is simply this: whatever your idea of a saner American foreign policy is, it should first and foremost be a pro-American policy. I think this both because it’s the first duty of a government to look after its own citizens, but also because it’s the only policy that’s likely to actually sell.

  • Radicalism vs. gradualism on responding to climate change

    This is where I, as a layman, get lost. Bill McKibben and others argue that we’re in the middle of a catastrophe in the making and that only radical changes in our way of life can mitigate the disaster.

    Meanwhile, Jonathan Rauch admits that climate change is a real and harmful phenomenon, but argues that gradualism is the only workable solution and that we should focus on minimizing the most serious harms at the margins. “No rethinking of capitalism is required.”

    I just don’t have a decent enough grasp of the science to adjudicate between these two positions.

  • More on growth, happiness, and climate change

    Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s an interview with Bill McKibbon that fleshes out some of his economic ideas a bit more.

    McKibbon uses the term “deep economy” (the title of his new book) to describe an economy that

    tends to draw in its supply lines instead of extend them. It produces using more people instead of fewer. It’s an economy that cares less about quantity than about quality; that takes as its goal the production of human satisfaction as much as surplus material; that is focused on the idea that it might endure and considers durability at least as important as increases in size.

    Essentially his point seems to be that we need more local economies which can, in turn, be regulated more effectively by stronger communities. He’s clearly taking inspiration from thinkers like E.F. Schumacher and Wendell Berry here.

    In fact, McKibbon says that tight-knit local communities might be needed for sheer survival:

    [I]f you stop to think about it, you start to understand that the communities we need to build in order to slow down global warming are the same kind of communities that are going to be resilient and durable enough to help adapt to that which we can’t prevent. In the not very distant future, having neighbors is going to be more important than having belongings. Membership in a community is going to become important once again both psychologically and physically in the way that it’s been for most of human history.

    The point doesn’t seem so much to be that we need to put a stop to growth, but that it needs to be effectively regulated, and that we need to put a check on our appetites. He points out that economic research is discovering what philosophy and religion have known for centuries: that after a certain point more stuff doesn’t make us happier. I think I’d like to read the book to get a better sense of what he’s describing at any rate.