Category Archives: Politics

Razib Khan on ISIS

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He writes,

Being a good parent, friend, and a consummate professional. But not everyone is a parent, and not everyone has a rich network of friends, or a fulfilling profession. Ideologies like communism, and religious-political movements like Islamism, are egalitarian in offering up the possibilities of heroism for everyone by becoming part of a grand revolutionary story.

There is much more at the link. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I am reading Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, by Roger Scruton, the British conservative philosopher. Most of you will not want to read it, because it mostly discusses European philosophers. But I came away with some interesting ideas to chew on, and I may attempt to write an essay on the book. One of his points is that the left-right lens through which we view politics is designed not to be analytically sound but instead to tilt things in favor of Communists. The idea is to put fascism on the far right and Communism on the far left. Since everybody hates fascism, the implication is that you should like Communism, or at least cut it some slack.

I think that a more useful organizing axis for political movements might be satisfied vs. disaffected. People who support Hillary or Jeb are satisfied. They do not want to rock the boat. People who support Trump or Sanders are somewhat disaffected. Extremist groups, like ISIS, appeal to people who are extremely disaffected.

Where would you put libertarians on this axis? I would put them much closer to the satisfied end. As ticked off as they are about government and politics, they tend to be basically happy with their own lives.

The Quotable Martin Gurri

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In The Revolt of the Public, he writes,

The rhetoric of democratic politics seems to have gotten out of whack with the reality of what democratic governments can achieve.

Actually, his book has many quotable soundbites, but this one is very central to his main theme. The public has become more informed about the failures of government, but politicians are not encouraging people to lower their expectations. On the contrary, the competitive equilibrium seems to lead toward politicians making ever more extravagant promises.

How to Defeat ISIS

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In most cases, civilized soldiers have defeated primitive warriors only when they adopted the latter’s tactics. In the history of European expansion, soldiers repeatedly had to abandon their civilized techniques and weaphons to win against even the more primitive opponents. The unorthodox techniques adopted were smaller, more mobile units; abandonment of artillery and use of lighter smaller arms; open formations and skirmishing tactics; increased reliance on ambushes, raids, and surprise attacks on settlements; destruction of the enemy’s economic infrastructure (habitations, foodstores, livestock, and means of transport); a strategy of attrition against the enemy manpower; relentless pursuit to take advantage of civilization’s superior logistics; and extensive use of natives as scouts and auxiliaries.

This is from Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, published in 1996, as quoted in Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety. Turchin goes on to write,

There is no question that civilized states almost always prevail against tribal warriors in the end, but they do so primarily because they are large-scale societies fighting small-scale societies. . .guerrillas simply avoid battles against the numerically and technologically superior government forces.

Both primitive warriors and modern guerrillas rely not on brute force but on mobility, stealth, and surprise.

And a few pages later,

The distinguishing characteristic of human combat is the ability to strike from a distance coupled with mobility.

Actually, on the topic of defeating ISIS, I confess to being to the dovish side of President Obama at this point. I think that an actual war to defeat ISIS would be bloody and brutal. Meanwhile, it strikes me as wrong to be engaging in acts of war with no formal declaration of war and at best a vague commitment to winning.

If the point of not sending in our people (I hate the term “boots on the ground”–as if we were talking about inanimate leather artifacts) is that this is someone else’s war, then I think that is an argument for staying out of it altogether. The counter-argument is that ISIS are really bad people, they could get worse before they get better, and some of their badness spills over into this country. Maybe the counter-argument is right, and I could see myself making it at some point. But as of this moment, I think that on balance the better policy is to avoid involvement altogether.

Separately, Amar Bhide arrives at the same conclusion, but by a slightly different route, stressing the evils of colonialism. I think Bhide assigns too much blame to colonial history, when there are also other sources of problems in the region. For example, I doubt that anyone would try to trace the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict to western imperialism.

Martin Gurri on Today’s News

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Maybe in a few weeks I will have forgotten about Martin Gurri and moved on to something else, but right now I am viewing everything in the newspaper through the lenses he provides in The Revolt of the Public.

One of Gurri’s themes is that elites now make unrealistic promises to the public, and the public soon discovers this, discrediting the elites. So, in today’s WaPo, the lead story is about world leaders denouncing the North Korean test of a hydrogen bomb. The public is going to view this as a government failure. After all, back in the Clinton Administration, they reached a deal with North Korea that was supposed to keep it from going nuclear altogether. The WaPo buries the issue of the Iran deal in a different story, and there the spin is that the Iran deal is a success because Obama paid attention to it while he let North Korea slip his mind. My guess is that this talking point is not going to work with the public.

The second top front-page story is headlined Germany targets a surge in vitriol (the digital version uses different wording but gives the same message). Later down in the story, you read about the New Year’s Eve rampage in Cologne that was “allegedly committed by gangs of young Arab and North African men.” My guess is that the public thinks that the lead story is the rampage, not the vitriol. And the public sees the rampage as evidence of government failure in its promise to absorb immigrants without problems. (Of course, I am over-generalizing when I say “the” public, but you can be sure that I am describing a significant segment of the population.)

UPDATE: A Failure by Germany’s Elite.

Another of Gurri’s themes is that the elites are blindsided by the public. The elites take it for granted that they are competent and that their authority will be respected. When the public revolts, the elites’ first inclination is to go into denial.

Martin Gurri on the political implications of communications technology

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I have just about finished reading The Revolt of the Public. It is an important book, but not easy to digest. I give Virginia Postrel a lot of credit for boiling it down fairly well, but there is more to it than fit in her write-up.

Back in the 1990s, a lot of people tried to forecast the impact of the Internet on politics. Libertarians thought that it would lead to a more libertarian world. Social democrats thought it would lead to a more social democratic world. I don’t recall any conservative prognostications.

Gurri says it could lead to a more nihilistic world, one in which newly-empowered outsiders tear down elite control structures but are then left with the question, “Now what?”

Gurri says that elite insiders have difficulty coming to terms with the revolutionary implications of the new communications environment. Cue Ross Douthat, trying to explain why he did not foresee the Donald Trump phenomenon.

Now if I wanted to avoid giving Trump his due, I could claim that I didn’t underestimate him, I misread everyone else — from the voters supporting him despite his demagoguery to the right-wing entertainers willing to forgive his ideological deviations.

In fact, I lean toward that view. There was a market niche available, and Trump happened to fill it. Some of it reflects his individual skill, but I am not inclined to put too much emphasis on that.

The point about “right-wing entertainers” is well taken. For years, conservative talk radio personalities have railed against “RINO’s” (Republicans in Name Only) and claimed that if the Republicans stopped nominating me-too candidates and instead ran a real conservative for President they would win. The way that I look at it, anyone who really believed in the need for Republicans to nominate someone reliably conservative would prefer almost any Republican candidate in the race other than Trump. (I am hardly alone in that view.) But it seems that the talk radio hosts are happy to toss prior convictions out the window in order to excite their listeners.

I keep going back to the 1960s. In 1964, Barry Goldwater was nominated by an insurgency, and he got crushed. I think that in 2016 the insurgent candidate with the highest chance of getting the nomination (and I put his chances at well under 50 percent) is not Donald Trump, but Bernie Sanders. And I think that if Sanders is nominated, then he will get crushed.

In any case, Gurri provides the best analytical framework I have come across for understanding current politics, both here and in other countries. Ross Douthat should give it a read.

China Fact of the Day

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George Friedman writes,

most Chinese wealth is concentrated 200 miles from the coast. The next 500–1,000 miles west is a land of Han Chinese living in Third World poverty. The China that most Westerners think about is the thin strip along the coast. The fact is that China is an overwhelmingly poor country with a thin veneer of prosperity.

His main point is that Chinese leaders will be more obsesssed with internal issues than with external issues.

Tort Insurance for Immigrants? for Everyone?

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A reader (not Steve Sailer) asked me to comment on this suggestion that immigrants be required to purchase insurance.

Think of immigration as being like driving. If you are going to go hurtling about the landscape in a multiton projectile, it’s only fair to others that you demonstrate that you are able to pay for any damage you might do. Thus, practically every state requires car owners to have driver’s insurance or otherwise post bond in some kind of quasi-insurance system.

The idea of requiring insurance is that it allows victims to sue and obtain compensation, which they could not do for harms caused by individuals with low net worth who do not have insurance. My reaction is to wonder why only immigrants should be required to carry insurance. Any of us has the potential to inflict harm that would cost far more than our net worth. Maybe everyone should be required to obtain some sort of catastrophic liability insurance.

This would put insurance companies in an interesting position. They would want to find out a lot of information about individuals and then attach prices to various risk factors. Criminal history? Gun ownership? Diagnosis for mental illness? Hostile postings on social media? Position in the financial industry?

My own sense is that the concept is unworkable and distasteful. In general, I am not a big fan of tort law as a social regulatory mechanism, and I am not a big fan of the insurance industry.

As I recall, around 1975-1985 the Wall Street Journal editorial page was really enamored of this idea, but they have subsequently gone in the other direction. They now tend to take the view that lawsuits in this country are excessive and often socially harmful. I am inclined to agree.

Professional Government

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Alberto Mingardi writes,

I was also quite struck by a comment from Ben Carson, which I only now realise was one of the recurring themes of his campaign. Carson said that “our government was set up for citizen statesmen, not for career politicians.” I think he nailed a very important fact.

Read the whole post, which is about the tension between the desire for amateurs as elected leaders in a democratic society and professionals as technocrats in a bureaucracy. My view, which I think is Alberto’s also, is that the professionals will become increasingly powerful, and the elected leaders will become increasingly more like figureheads.

In terms of the Murray Edelman/Merle Kling model of insiders and outsiders, the bureaucrats become increasingly powerful players in the real game of controlling resources. Meanwhile, the elected leaders become increasingly irrelevant showmen, distracting the public with symbolic gestures.

Merry Christmas.

Terror Soldiers and Lone Wackos

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Eric Raymond makes a distinction that should be pretty obvious.

A lone wacko is a tragedy but almost never a disaster; a terror network can scale up violence to much greater levels by deploying multiple soldiers, and is far more likely to have expertise in bomb-making, airplane hijackings, and other means that can inflict casualties well above the level of a rampage shooting with personal firearms.

One of his more tendentious claims is that many on the left go out of their way to misclassify these two types, because

the left end of the American political spectrum is heavily invested in the belief that “right-wing terrorism” is prevalent in the U.S. and a greater danger than either left terrorism or Islamism.

From the oppressor-oppressed axis point of view, you want to lean in the direction of treating a lone wacko who attacks a Planned Parenthood facility as a terror soldier, and you want to lean in the direction of treating an Islamist terror soldier who attacks an American military base as a lone wacko.

Raymond’s sensible analysis leads to sensible conclusions.

Rampage killings are a public health problem – police may be the first responders to an incident, but the effective interventions to prevent them them are mainly medical, not criminological.

On the other hand, what terror soldiers do is best thought of as a kind of distributed irregular warfare, intended like all warfare to break the enemy’s will to resist. Criminal enforcement can typically do little or nothing about their networks. Instead, the normal counter to irregular warfare applies; you want to bait them into concentrating so they can be confronted and destroyed by regular forces.

That was the French strategy in what was then Indochina in 1954, when they deliberately set up their base in a valley in order to lure the opposing general into concentrating his forces nearby. The resulting battle and its outcome are historically significant.

Thoughts on War

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Not my area of expertise, of course. But Neerav Kingsland, also not an expert, wrote this post on the Ian Morris book, which I have not read, and he wondered if I had thoughts. First, some excerpts from Neerav’s post:

Morris’ thesis is this:

1. Government is the primary source of the reduction of violence in societies.
2. Wars caused societies to merge, thereby increasing the scope, scale, and efficacy of government.
3. It would have been great if societies had figured out a way to merge without war, but this, unfortunately, has rarely happened.
4. So, like it or not, war has been the driver of government innovation.
5. Therefore, wars have been the primary cause of our long-term decline of violence.

…Generally, massive war breaks out when a superpower declines.

My thoughts:

1. If you’re a libertarian having a hard time getting your mind around this, think of war as a way of achieving open borders. That is, before they fight, country X and country Y have borders. After they fight, the winner takes over all the territory, and the borders no longer matter.

2. If you are a Hobbesian, then you believe that only a strong government can produce peace. You might regard the U.S. Navy as the force that made the last 70 years of globalization possible.

3. In the wake of the attacks in Paris and San Bernadino, you would think that Congress should declare war on somebody.

Instead, we have this vague “authorization to use military force.” The most charitable reading I can give of that is that it allows the President maximum flexibility to wage war in a very ambiguous setting, in which enemies do not wear uniforms and they are embedded with civilians. But I personally do not like this approach. Here are two alternatives that I think are better, although it should be clear on reflection that there are major problems with every possible approach.

a) Get rid of the authorization to use military force and legislate a strict non-interventionist policy. I think that has at least two things going for it. First, it is a clear, unambiguous policy. Second, it does not run all of the risks of flawed execution and unintended consequences that flow from interventions. However, it does mean that whatever advantage there is/was from having the U.S. as hegemonic power gets tossed away. For example, we might go through a period of de-globalization, as various conflicts spin out of control.

b) Get rid of the generic authorization to use military force and instead declare war on the Islamic State. One advantage of this is that it designates a specific enemy and implies a finite objective. We would stop sending drones all over the map and instead focus on taking over the territory that now belongs to barbarians. The disadvantages are that this increases casualties in the short run and it probably means that we would have to undertake a long-term military occupation, which has many pitfalls. It exerts no leverage against Syrian President Assad (it probably helps him). It ignores any barbarism that originates elsewhere.