The Debatable Land

Shakespeare: Fascist! Virgil: Fascist! Ovid: Un-Roman! Marlowe: Government Goon!

I suppose one should probably read Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism before criticising it. On the other hand, why do the dreary work when Spencer Ackerman's prepared to highlight the juicy bits for one? For instance, Spencer draws my attention to this:

Indeed, it is my argument that during World War I, America became a fascist country, albeit temporarily. The first appearance of modern totalitarianism in the Western world wasn't in Italy or Germany but in the United States of America. How else would you describe a country where the world's first modern propaganda ministry was established; political prisoners by the thousands were harassed, beaten, spied upon, and thrown in jail simply for expressing private opinions; the national leader accused foreigners and immigrants of injecting treasonous "poison" into the American bloodstream; newspapers and magazines were shut down for criticizing the government; nearly a hundred thousand government propaganda agents were sent out among the people to whip up support for the regime and its war; college professors imposed loyalty oaths on their colleagues; nearly a quarter-million goons were given legal authority to intimidate and beat "slackers" and dissenters; and leading artists and writers dedicated their crafts to proselytizing for the government?

Yes, "albeit temporarily" has to do a lot of work there. But so too does "modern". Because, really, propaganda ministries and political prisoners and loyalty oaths and the silencing of dissent have been around for quite some time. I mean, strip the references to the United States and the numbers from this remarkable paragraph and one might be forgiven for thinking that Mr Goldberg was referring to either (to pluck just two examples from history) Elizabethan England or Augustan Rome.

After all, leading artists" such as Virgil and Shakespeare "dedicated their crafts to proselytising for the government". If Goldberg is correct then fellows such as Walsingham and Maecenas would also have been right at home in Woodrow Wilson's America. And perhaps they would have been. But what of it? How many regimes or institutions can be considered "fascist" before the term loses any meaning? His argument, as outlined in this example at least, does not seem to be much more advanced than the rather silly notion that because A Hitler was a vegetarian anti-smoker, all anti-smoking and vegetarian zealots are Nazis. (Obviously, I think they're vindictive fools, but that don't mean they're in quite the same league as the SS). Alternatively, one might suggest that a society can share certain characteristics with fascism (People! Air!) without necessarily being a fascist society. This seems a fairly elementary point.

If Goldberg's definition stands then most political regimes in history should be considered "fascist" to one degree or another. Does he really mean to water down fascism to the point at which it becomes a meaningless catch-all phrase? Probably not. So why is he doing so? If everything is fascism then, really, nothing is. I suppose I'll have to a) read the book myself to find out or b) hope that Spencer gets beyond page 24 pretty soon.

Trick or Treat or Voucher?

Megan McArdle has been on a rare old tear recently, pushing the argument for school choice, here and here and here and here and here. It will not surprise some readers that I rather agree with her.

Clearly, however, this just proves my foolishnesss. Did you know that it's impossible to make a good faith argument in favour of school choice or any programme that gives poor families greater input into where their children are educated? Me neither. Time for me to be telt, obviously.

Exhibit A) Matt Yglesias:

...the United States already "allows" poor parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems in much the same way that it allows rich and middle class parents to withdraw their children from inner city school systems. They're "allowed" to send their kids to a private school that's willing to educate them, and they're "allowed" to move elsewhere. Obviously, in practice poor families have less practical capacity to do this. But by the same token, poor families have less practical capacity to live on streets with well-appointed sidewalks, to choose cruelty-free meat, to get health care, to benefit from competently organized disaster relief, to live in neighborhoods with low murder rates, and all kinds of other things. These are all real problems but since they're problems of practical capacity rather than permission (about the fair value of the right, rather than the existence of the right) institutional design is about all that matters.

Exhibit B) Ezra Klein:

There are a lot of very good, very smart people thinking through education policy, childhood poverty, etc. Then there are somewhat more shallow people who want to propose a tough-minded solution to the sorry state of inner city education, and they fasten on vouchers (which no evidence has ever suggested will actually solve the problem) or teacher's unions (ditto). Those policies may have some worth. But they are not Answers, no study has ever suggested otherwise, and forcing us into an endless conversation over them is actually bad, so far as I can tell, for the education debate. They do, however, give a certain class of participants a useful club with which to beat on liberals and accuse them of active opposition to the disadvantaged.

So there you have it. If you think that giving people more control over their lives is a good thing you're just being glib. And you probably hate poor folk too.

The question is not whether or not a voucher system can improve everyone's education overnight but whether or not it can do more than the status quo to advance the interests of children. Matt - rather blithely! - says "Obviously, in practice poor families have less practical capacity" to move to catchment areas for the best state schools (because they can't afford to) which is, of course, precisely the point. The whole idea behind school choice is that, in time, competition for pupils between schools will drive up standards (as well as increase parental involvement in their kids' education).

The question is not one of perfection but of improvement and, frankly, given the proportion of kids in state schools (in the UK and the US) who are not benefiting from the kind of education we would wish them to receive, it is hard to see quite why the idea of letting ordinary people have more control over their lives can be a bad thing.

That empowerment would, from a philosophical point of view, be a good thing anyway. It makes no more sense for the state to tell you where your kids may be educated at high school than it does for the state to tell you what university you may attend. So, yes, school choice has - in my view - a value even if it produced the same educational outcomes as the current system. I'd also say that in the long-term such a scenario seems unlikely: introducing competition to the state sector seems more likely to drive up standards, just as it already does in the private sector. Follow the money: I have a hard time believing that incentivising schools to perform better is really likely to prove catastrophic. Indeed, I'm not sure I can recall a major piece of research concluding that voucher programmes in other countries have made matters worse. 

Equally it is remarkable that so many people should still cling to the "one size fits all" approach when experience suggests that there are precious few human activities for which this is appropriate, let alone one as complex and subject to so many variables as education.

At the risk of labouring the point, the notion that school choice programmes will destroy education and are the province only of those who wish to enslave the poor would be news to those countries that have introduced vouchers. Among them are our old friends in Sweden and the Netherlands as well as, on the other side of the world, New Zealand.

Sweden's story is interesting: the vouchers proved controversial when introduced 15 years ago by a (by Swedish standards) right-wing government. Tellingly, however, there is no popular support now for abandoning the programme. A paper from Stockholm's  Research Institute of Industrial Economics (which can be downloaded here) which studied the impact of Sweden's voucher system on 28,000 kids finds, contra Ezra's claim that "no evidence" has ever been found that vouchers can be part of a solution:

Greater competition improves the standards of public schools...Sweden has left a system with virtually no parental influence over school choice, and an almost complete dominance of public schools. A voucher system, where parents are allowed to choose any school approved by the National Agency for Education, has been put in its place...

A widespread concern among opponents of school choice is that competition will hurt the public schools. The present study shows this fear to be without foundation.

No wonder that, to the best of my knowledge, vouchers and choice programmes have proven popular wherever they have been implemented: in Europe, the antipodes and in countries such as Chile and Colombia in Latin America. Now, clearly there are many ways to skin a cat and school choice schemes vary from country to country. But the basic point remains that school choice is popular wherever it is introduced. From that one may deduce that parents are, on the whole, satisfied with the greater opportunities available to them. It requires quite some imagination to suppose that parents in each of these very different countries have been duped by a nefarious right-wing plot to destroy education.

As Caroline Hoxby, professor of economics at Harvard, argues in this paper:

The essence of school choice is a claim that if government intervenes mainly through setting prices and parameters, education investment will be more optimal than if it intervenes through quantity regulation or, more usually, straight government provision. School choice is a claim about the form of intervention, not a claim that education is best left to a laissez-faire market because, if they were interested in a laissez-faire situation, advocates of school choice would presumably not be interested in the use of tax dollars at all.

Hoxby cites three factors vital to a successful choice programme:  supply flexibility, money following students and independent school management.  Take any one of those elements away - as has been the case in, say, Milwaukee where the money does not follow pupils effectively and independent management (which does not mean being free from assessment) has been curtailed - and you reduce the impact and efficacy of any voucher or school choice system.

Matt talks about "practical capacity" as though this were an insuperable problem. In other words, even if you let everyone choose their school all the good ones are going to be over-subscribed so the best you can hope for is that a few kids will be better off but that most will see no real difference in their situation. But that's why the money is important: if the money follows the pupil (and crucially, is taken from poorly performing schools) then over-subscribed schools have an additional incentive (beyond altruism or a sense of mission) to expand. Crucially they also have the ability to do so.

That's why voucher programmes of the sort favoured by most pro-voucher experts are explicitly designed to address the point Matt makes here:

If we're concerned not about the "right" of exit (which already exists) but the practical ability to get a better education, then you need policies that increase the supply of schools that do a good job of educating poor children.

Well, yeah, that's exactly the point. (And is also why it takes time for voucher programmes to work: the good schools won't expand automatically, nor will the bad, unpopular ones fade away immediately. Hence it's silly to say, "hey look vouchers aren't working" after just one or two years. It's a long-term effort at improvement, not an immediate panacea.)

Now it may be that all these other countries with their silly choice programmes and all the parents who would like to be able to choose schools for their kids are wrong. Perhaps they really have no clue about what works best for their kids. And, yes, perhaps some voucher enthusiasts are from time to time too keen to suggest that vouchers are a magical and immediate solution to all educational problems. But... I find it hard to believe that they're quite such a pernicious policy proposal as Matt and Ezra would have us think. Nor, needless to say, do I find their sweeping accusations of bad faith terribly convincing.   

UPDATE: Time Lee has more good things to say on this.

Two tribes go to war: progressives and, er, liberals...

This eyebrow-raising quote comes from Ezra Klein:

"Insofar as there's a tension between the army and progressives, it's cultural and ideological...Progressives are quite skeptical of using military force, if not of those who make up the military ad that creates his own frictions. To say that the argument is between progressives and the military is to personalize what's actually an ideological dispute. The issue is much more about differing conceptions of the use of force and our capability and responsibility to carry out certain missions than it is about the groups involved. The same arguments and tensions and frictions occur between progressives and the liberal hawks."

Really? But what happens when the progressives are the liberal hawks?

Ezra says progressives are "quite skeptical of using military force." Double really? If you were to ask an average person to name a couple of progressive politicians, I suspect Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson would poll better than most. Neither of them can be accused of being hesitant or instinctively skeptical about using military force. Rather the opposite in fact...

Indeed I rather thought that Hillary Clinton prefers being called a progressive than a liberal was precisely because liberal is overloaded with connotations of weakness, hesitancy and a reluctance to use the American military to pursue the national interest. Progressives, by contrast, are - at least in Clinton's mind - not associated with that weakness, preferring to advocate a muscular internationalism that is quite happy to send the 101st and the 82nd off to distant parts of the world.

But perhaps Ezra is talking about a different sort of progressive. Then again, I'm minded to recall that it's Democrats who are much more likely, these days, to object to the proliferation of ballot initiatives and referenda that  were once one of the progressive great calling cards in the western states. That all leaves one wondering how much progressivism you can dump while remaining anything like a, well, progressive?

Choice for people like us...

Auguste at the impeccably liberal Pandagon reveals the inefficient way school choice works:

Does anyone know of a good house/apartment rental resource that allows one to search for housing opportunities by elementary school?

Nothing wrong with that. Of course some of us would like to see those choices extended to people who are not in a position to pay the housing premium necessary to get your kids into the better sort of school but hey, that's the dangerously wacky voucher-loving crowd for you, ain't it? We hates, hates, hates poor people.

[Hat tip: Mr Worstall]

Bloomberg: good for the libertarians?

Rather oddly, Matt Yglesias seems to think so:

"...it seems to me that a Bloomberg Administration is likely to be substantially more libertarian than either a Democratic or a Republican one would be. Bloomberg, however, is specifically identified with a brand of trivial nanny-stating -- indoor smoking ban, trans fat ban -- that seems to be to aggravate libertarians in a manner that's out of proportion to the actual significance of the policy issues."

This seems unconvincing. To begin with, episodes such as the smoking ban are not trivial to libertarians. But nor are they actually all that insignificant in terms of policy issues either. These sorts of illiberal policies demonstrate that  there's  almost no area of human activity Bloomberg doesn't believe could (and worse, should) not be improved by the all-knowing, well-meaning state. (To remind you: the smoking ban is offensive not merely because it inconveniences people but because it's an assault upon business and a publican's right to run his affairs as he sees fit.)

It's hard, then, to think that a President Bloomberg is going to be any friendlier to libertarian preoccupations than his rivals, none of whom, it surely does not need to be said, offer much more encouragement to libertarian-minded folk.

Even if, however, you do think smoking and trans fat bans are insignificant policy issues, you might pause to consider if it is significant that the state should choose to involve itself in these issues. I can see why American liberals might be untroubled by this, but it seems a bit much to ask libertarians to agree with this proposition.

Panic! People are having babies in Hollywood movies...

I've not seen Knocked Up yet, but the estimable Chris Orr has a fine riposte to those horrified by the film's reluctance to kow-tow to some imagined notion of what liberal orthodoxy ought to be:

As a liberal who writes about film, there are few things that I find more irritating than the tendency of other liberal film writers to treat the 95 percent of Hollywood films that push (explicitly or implicitly) liberal ideas as if they were utterly apolitical and commonsensical, and then react with shock and despair on those rare occasions when a movie with conservative themes makes its way to theatres.

Yes, in two recent films, Waitress and Knocked Up, a woman whom we might otherwise expect to consider abortion instead opts to have the baby. (Isn't it supposed to take three examples to establish a trend?) And yes, of course, Hollywood would prefer not to talk about abortion at all, as it's a subject generally not known for its entertainment value.

But do we really need successive articles in Slate and The New York Times positing some conservative climate of fear in Hollywood?

Apparently we do.

Slate's Dana Stevens (where are you, David Edelstein?) complained about:

the virtual nonexistence of abortion as a real option for Katherine Heigl's character Alison Scott, in the film.

Ezra Klein's friends had a similar reaction:

Some in my group seemed genuinely distressed that the main character didn't choose an abortion, and were ready to write off the film for that initial bit of betrayal.

I should note that Ezra himself found that attitude "baffling." So do I. (And since the movie is largely about the struggles that follow the decision to have the child, aborting the fetus would rather ruin the point of the movie. But hey, if you'd rather have The Great Escape without the, er, escape bit then that's fine by me.)

Remarkably Ms Stevens, in her review of Knocked Up and her subsequent attempted rebuttal of some of Ross Douthat's observations failed to make any reference to Apatow's previous move, the wondrous The 40 year Old Virgin. This is strange since Knocked Up is something of a companion piece to its predecessor and, taken together, the two movies would seem to present a picture that is rather more complicated than the standard narrative that Apatow is an unfashionably (or disturbingly?) conservative film-maker.

The 40 Year Old Virgin was only the most subversive mainstream movie in years. In a year in which the dismal Crash could win the Best Picture Oscar it was, in my view, regrettable that The 40 Year Old Virgin wasn't even nominated in that category and verging on scandalous that Apatow didn't receive a screenwriting nomination either. 

Yes, social conservatives were surprised by The 40 Year Old Virgin, pleased to see a movie in which abstinence was rewarded and which was prepared to satirise, even condemn, the pubescence of much of popular culture (though one might also pause to remember that the movie also endorses liberal sex education: witness the oddly touching scene at the family planning clinic). But viewed from just a slightly different angle, that's also what made The 40 Year Old Virgin such a feminist movie. I seem to recall that feminists object, or used to at any rate, to the relentless sexualisation and objectification of women in the media and throughout popular culture; so does The 40 year old Virgin.

Steve Carell's character is not heroic because he remains a virgin for so long, but because he proves capable of seeing a woman as a woman, rather than as a member of a mysterious, dangerous, unfathomable species. Not coincidentally, he is the only character who isn't actually afraid of women (shy around them, yes, but not in this deeper sense, afraid). His misadventures with his colleagues from the electronics store are funny because we know this is not who Andy really is and because, deep down, we know their behaviour is insulting, degrading and childish.  The men of the world are the real children; Andy, supposedly the naive loser surrounded by his Superhero toys, the actual adult.   

Apatow shows that the sort of desperate objectification of women he satirises has a boomerang effect: treating women as pieces of meat is bad for women, of course, but it also degrades the objectifiers, leaving them half-formed and damaged. It's only when the boys realise they could in fact learn from Andy that they have any shot at redemption themselves. In this respect, then, you can reasonably say that The 40 Year Old Virgin is not just conservative and feminist, but also, and more importantly, humanistic and egalitarian.

I'd be very surprised if Knocked Up didn't follow that pattern. In fact it seems it does: Amanda Marcotte (with whom I'm not generally predisposed to agree, even if her Katyusha rocket style can be entertaining) has an interesting take on Knocked Up too and one that seems pretty persuasive to me. Apatow, she writes, shows:

Alison's struggle to make the choice to have the baby, not backing off of the word “abortion”, nor pretending people fling it around easily (preferring a euphemism I’ve heard, “take care of it”). He doesn’t condescend to her choice to have the baby, either, respecting that it’s hard to pin down the “why” with these things to one corny moment, and instead letting Alison have her ambiguous motivations that come across very believably on-screen.

In a recent New York Times Magazine profile Apatow said:

I believe in those guys. There's something honorable about...not breaking up for the sake of the baby. I see people get divorced, and there is a part of me that thinks, I wonder how hard they tried?''

You can call that "conservative" or "moralising" if you like,you may even say it's not a realistic scenario given the characters we see in Knocked Up. But it's also the case that Apatow is making a movie that, though a comedy, seems to be rooted in real-life in one important respect: how do people overcome serious obstacles and challenges in their lives? How do you do your best in imperfect circumstances? Within the limitations of a Hollywood comedy Apatow is intent on showing that this stuff is hard. That's a more grown-up message than you'll find in most Hollywood comedies.

In that NYT profile Apatow also admitted:

''Throughout my life I have used work as an emotional crutch...I used to always feel inadequate in every area except my ability to work hard enough to succeed in comedy. Then you're blessed with wonderful children and an amazing wife, but still you find yourself sitting on the floor playing Care Bears, and you are thinking about a problem with a script or an executive you are fighting with. It's not fair to them.''

Again, you can, if you must, call this knee-jerk family values conservatism, but it's also a plea for men to become more involved with their families, taking on more responsibility and living up to their emotional rather than merely financial obligations. And, again, I rather thought that was something many feminists wanted to see happen too. Once more: Apatow is saying that the failure to be properly invested in domestic life isn't just unfair on your wife and kids, it leaves you unfulfilled too. So there's a 1990s "New Man" thing at work here too.

All this escapes Ms Stevens. For her, the failure to do more than "tiptoe" around the abortion issue might be nothing more than a "marketing decision". Furthermore:

Apatow's reticence on the subject seems to spring less from personal conviction than from the fear of offending his audience's sensibilities. This kind of Trojan horse moralism is maddeningly common in pop-culture representations of abortion, which seem muzzled, invisibly policed, by either the pro-life lobby or the fear of it.

OK then... Though, as Amanda Marcotte among others pointed out, High Fidelity, to take but one example, is a movie in which Laura (played by the lovely Iben Hjelje) and Rob (John Cusack) put their lives back together after she has a) dumped him and b) had an abortion - a decision Laura made with regret rather than zeal admittedly but which is not shown to ruin either her life or her prospects. And as Chris Orr says:

I seem to recall two recent films, The Cider House Rules...and Vera Drake... that netted Academy Award nominations (and one victory) for actors playing heroic abortion providers.

But back to Ms Stevens:

As the mother of a 1-year-old daughter, I think I can say that if she turned up pregnant in her early 20s under exactly Alison's circumstances—single, barely acquainted with the father, financially dependent (she lives with her married sister), weeping miserably at her first sonogram—I would encourage her to at least consider the possibility of abortion, without in any way impugning the "realness" of the child should she decide to keep it. In that same hypothetical conversation... I would certainly tell my beloved girl that, like most of my close female friends... I had an abortion myself around that age, and while it was far from the high point of the decade, it's a decision I look back on now with neither anguish nor regret.

One may disagree on the extent of any "impugning" of the "'realness of the child" in this scenario but many of us will know women who have made that same kind of decision (with varying degrees of anguish) themselves; but we also know people who chose to have children in difficult or at least less than ideal circumstances (such as, for instance, being pregnant while an undergraduate only to find oneself deserted by the father of the child who makes it clear that, sorry love, you're on your own here). For myself, I don't necessarily think less of women who have an abortion in these circumstances, but I do think more of those that choose to have the child.

But the more remarkable line is "like most of my close female friends...I had an abortion."  Now, sure, there's a body of opinion that an abortion ought never to be a matter of regret and that to say it's a serious, weighty decision rather more important than deciding what to wear tonight is to give credence to the "pro-life" point of view. That's not a view I share, but it's one I can understand.

How far does this go however? Is there a limit to what even the most ardent pro-choice activist would consider morally acceptable behaviour?  While one can sympathise with a woman in desperate straits who chooses to have an abortion once, does that sympathy deserve to be extended to her if she has a second termination? At what point does individual responsibility kick-in? According to this Ramesh Ponnuru article the respected Alan Guttmacher Institute estimates that no less than 48% of abortion procedures are performed upon women who have already had at least one abortion.

If I were involved in the pro-choice movement I'd want to do everything I could to reduce that number since it's hard to imagine many more potent recruiting tools for the pro-life position than the idea that abortion has become as routine as a regular check-up for some women (even if this is, in the scheme of things, a relatively small number of women).

Clearly there's a class element to this too: the poor mother in the ghetto, perhaps already burdened by trying to raise five kids on her own, is in a different category from the upper middle-class, wealthy, educated woman in Los Angeles or New York City for whom kids are an inconvenience etc etc. The former hypothetical is tragic, the latter vile even if one recognises (as I in fact do, albeit without much enthusiasm) that it is preferable that abortion be legal. (Yes, I approve of the Clintonian formulation, "Safe, Legal and Rare".)

Indeed, if I wanted to make a zealously pro-life movie I'd feature a group of wealthy, beautiful, successful but essentially self-indulgent hipsters, all of whom become pregnant at least once, fitting their terminations in between shopping in Soho and dinner at Nobu.  It would be a movie in which the idea of actually having the child would be raised only so it could be dismissed as a transparently absurd notion. I mean, come on, people don't really want to be tied down by these baby things do they? How extraordinary. It scarcely needs to be said that this is not the "propaganda" movie Judd Apatow has made.

Finally, since this post has probably gone on long enough, of course we all bring our own experiences and beliefs with us to the cinema and of course these colour or inform our responses to what we see. But this tendency to judge a movie's excellence, importance or relevance by the extent to which it confirms or confronts our own prejudices is a depressing trend. In this particular instance most of the small-mindedness is being exhibited by liberals, but one would not, of course, have to search very hard to find numerous instances of conservatives demonstrating the same failing.   

Gillespie vs Kuttner. Referee stops fight.

I'd thought about writing something about American Prospect head-honcho Bob Kuttner's odd - ok, loopy - column on airlines in today's Boston Globe. But Reason's Nick Gillespie has stolen any pleasure one might have gained from doing so by eviscerating the piece himself, rendering further reflections pretty much superfluous.

I'd just note that Kuttner has a point when he complains that deregulation has not brought about as much competition in the airline industry as it might have. His solution? Congressional hearings and, of course, more, not less regulation. Fancy that!

Mr Neoliberal Speaks...

Charlie Peters, defending neoliberalism in conversation with Ezra Klein:

I hate wasting public money on the rich, I hate the agricultural subsidies that go to the rich. It drives me crazy. And I hate wasting Social Security money on the rich, so that it is not something that benefits the middle class. I’ve said many times that, if anything, we want to give more to the poor and take away money from the rich.

Precisely. I doubt I'd go so far as to call myself, as Peters does, a "redistributionist" but it's crazy to be handing out money (in the US and UK alike) in the form of subsidies to people who don't need it. That being so, why the opposition to means testing? (I mean, why the opposition on grounds other than the fact that telling people they can't have government sweets anymore might be unpopular?)