Stefany Anne Golberg tries to understand a rapidly aging planet, by looking to literature and beyond:
The number of people who are 60 and older is set to triple in the next 40 years. By 2050, there will be more people aged 65 and older than children under 14 for the first time in history. By 2150, one in three people will be over 65. In developed countries, aging is coming sooner than that. By 2050, half of the people in Spain will be 55 or older. In England, there are already more baby boomers than teenagers. In Japan, the world’s oldest country, more than 21 percent of the population is over 65. The world is getting older and the process, given current trends, cannot be reversed. There may never again be a world that is mostly young. …
And yet, we haven't really asked ourselves just what it will feel like to live in an old world. Will reminiscing replace love songs? Will wisdom replace surprise?
There are many great insights in Christopher Caldwell's essay on the state of conservatism in the NYTBR today, and before engaging him on where I disagree, I should note where I concur. I like his elegant expression of the core conservative divide:
Republicans’ future electoral fortunes will depend on domestic policy and specifically on whether they can reconnect with “small-c” conservatism — the conservatism whose mottoes are “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “Mind your own business,” and the opposite of which is not liberalism but utopianism. The Bush administration was a time of “big-C” Conservatism, ideological conservatism, which the party pursued with mixed results. As far as social issues were concerned, this ideology riveted a vast bloc of religious conservatives to the party, and continues to be an electoral asset (although that bloc, by some measures, is shrinking). Had gay marriage not been on several state ballots in 2004, John Kerry might now be sitting in the White House.
But these were only mixed results, if you take an utterly cynical view of politics. The utopianism that gave us the Iraq war and nation-building in Afghanistan led to moral, strategic and fiscal disaster. Opposition to marriage equality may have saved Iowa in 2004, but it stranded the GOP against the tide of history, and branded it as intolerant and hateful. Ideological conservatism that argued that markets can regulate themselves – as opposed to small-c conservatism that understands that vigilant government regulation is essential to making markets work properly – gave us the worst financial crash and recession since the Great Depression. The rigidity on taxation, while blithely adding unfunded entitlements, gave us the real basis for the massive debt that we now face.
This is Caldwell's response on the supply-side calamity:
Yet the case against supply-side economics can never be airtight or decisive, and Republican tax promises will probably help the party this year. That is because taxes are not just an economic benchmark, but a political one. The public should not expect more in services than it pays in taxes. But the government should not expect more in taxes than it offers in representation. And the number of Americans who feel poorly represented has risen alarmingly during the Obama administration.
It seems to me that the evidence of the last twenty years proves conclusively – in, yes, an airtight way – that cutting taxes does not increase revenue. And the notion that the unpopularity of any president at any moment in time, despite regular elections, legitimately delegitimizes the need to raise taxes to ameliorate the debt … is peculiar in the extreme. It would have forbidden Reagan, Bush I and Clinton from raising taxes, because they were unpopular for doing so.
Then we have this remarkable statement:
There is little of the ad hominem contempt that was in evidence during the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Forbes magazine just photoshopped Obama as Stalin; tea-party rallies have been awash in Hitler comparisons; a huge chunk of Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim (which they regard as self-evidently bad, as Fox News now propagandizes) or not eligible to be president. Yes, Obama has remarkably high favorables among independents and Democrats – but Republicans have projected every literally demonic caricature they could imagine onto him. They also, pace Caldwell, obstructed him monolithically from the very get-go. What was Christopher smoking when he wrote this:
It is often said in the president’s defense that Republican obstructionism left him no choice. Today, this is true — and it has put an end, for now, to the productive part of his presidency. But it was not true at the time of the stimulus in early 2009, when the president’s poll numbers were so stratospherically high that it appeared risky to oppose him on anything.
Fully one third of the stimulus was tax cuts. We were potentially facing a second Great Depression. The Republicans had already backed TARP under their former president, bailing out the banks. Almost no economists favored doing nothing to stop demand spiraling downwards. Many on the left now argue that the stimulus wasn't big enough – and the unemployment rate certainly doesn't argue against them. And yet not a single Republican vote could be found for the president's measure at a time of enormous national danger and risk. That was how extremist and ideological the Congressional GOP was at the time, even as, of course, those very Republicans – who had taken pork barrel spending to new heights in the Bush years – boasted about stimulus projects in their own districts. I'm sorry but I do not believe the stimulus package was impossible for small-c conservatives to support in some measure, given the crisis we were facing. And so the monolithic Republican opposition in the president's first weeks in office was not a sign of Obama's sudden leftism, but of their profound and self-centered cynicism.
Caldwell then simply jumps from noting that Independents have moved away from Obama to saying they have done so because he has been far more left than his pre-election statements would imply, rather than concern over unemployment and the ever-rising debt. I challenge him: on what policy issue has Obama governed to the left of his campaign?
Healthcare? The policy that passed is close to identical to his campaign platform. Defense? He picked a Republican secretary of defense, stuck to Bush's withdrawal time-table in Iraq, and decided to out-Bush Bush on Afghanistan. He refused to prosecute the war crimes of his predecessors, was stuck with the limbo of Gitmo – where the torture of prisoners had made release and prosecution impossible or imprudent. Taxation? He cut taxes. The environment? He moved right – liberalizing deep sea oil exploration (which the GOP then tried to use against him with the BP disaster!) Social issues? He has not even lifted the ban on gay servicemembers in the military. This is to the left of where he campaigned? Please. And the polls, of course, do not even show the kind of unpopularity or disapproval that Chris diagnoses. Despite massive unemployment, Obama has higher ratings than Clinton or Reagan at this point in their presidencies.
Then he segues to class and religion and rightly sees a problem for the right because of the massive rush to the exits of the GOP by most people with something higher than a college degree. He air-brushes Palin as a pragmatist in Alaska, where any real understanding of her career reveals her to be, as she has subsequently shown, a member of the extreme religious and neocon right, wrapped up in cultural class warfare. And no, she wasn's slow in opposing the bridge to nowhere. She originally embraced it, even wearing sweatshirts championing it.
He is, of course, correct that victory in November will be a fascinating moment for the right. Will the GOP actually put forward a budget that raises no taxes but slashes spending – especially on Medicare and defense – to a degree not even envisaged by the British Tories? For that is what they will have to do to achieve any real progress. Will they repudiate the Debt Commission and fight against any debt-reduction at all, if it means returning to Clinton era tax rates for those earning over $250,000 a year? And will they try to repeal parts of the healthcare bill, which, like the ban on refusing coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, individually are actually very popular?
They seem to forget that just as the Senate has a filibuster, the president has a veto. And that with the stimulus programs, health insurance reform and financial re-regulation, the president has already achieved almost all he wanted legislatively, apart from cap-and-trade (which passed in the House). And, given their Beckian and Ailesian propaganda machine, they are far more likely to be cocooned from the center than the ever cautious Obama, and, in my view, will likely be more hubristic than Gingrich in 1994, with even less margin for error. And this time, as well as having to balance Obama to their fiscal right, they will have to appease the purist ideology of the tea-party they have stoked, or risk a Palinite third party that could kill off what's left of the GOP for good.
On this, perhaps, Christopher and I can agree. It really will get more interesting from here on out.
(Photo: Jim DeMint, Senate Minority leader, and Palin-backed Tea Party Republican candidate, Christine O'Donnell, after winning the primary for the Senate seat in Delaware. Both by Mark Wilson.)
Robert Dallek warns Obama of the three historical myths that have ruled American military engagement over the last century:
Obama seems keenly aware of the main lesson of Vietnam: Don't let the appeasement metaphor, cliché, conviction, call it what you will, lock you into an unwinnable war that destroys your presidency. He appreciates that a grand design or strategy in foreign affairs does not readily translate from one crisis to another. Appeasement was a terrible idea in dealing with Hitler, but avoiding it was never the right argument for crossing the 38th parallel in Korea or embroiling the United States in Vietnam. (After all, a stalemate in the first war and a defeat in the second did not deter the United States from winning the larger Cold War.) Nor is Obama persuaded by grand Wilsonian visions of bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan; he has made clear that he does not see military solutions to the problems America faces in those two countries. He has openly described the invasion of Iraq as a "mistake" and seems determined to de-escalate U.S. involvement in Afghanistan as soon as possible.
But no matter how conscious Obama is of the perils of history's traps, he faces no small challenge in convincing political opponents to relinquish the outworn foreign-policy clichés that have been of such questionable service to America's well-being. As Germany's Otto von Bismarck is said to have observed more than 100 years ago, great statesmen have the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history. More often than not, however, it is the accepted wisdoms — or the wrong lessons of history altogether — that govern the thinking of publics and the behavior of their leaders.
The Wikileaks doc-dump adds more light to debunking the myth of the surge. No one doubts that Petraeus' extra troops and shrewd bribery played a part in reducing sectarian violence of nightmarish levels. But the further we get away from that moment in time and the more we learn, the clearer it is that it was the internal dynamic of Iraq that created the lull:
A unique set of conditions had coalesced on the ground. The warring communities were exhausted from the frenzy of killing. Mixed neighborhoods and cities were largely cleansed. The militias, both Sunni and Shiite, long seen as defenders of their communities, had begun to cannibalize them, making local residents newly receptive to American overtures.
Civil wars have their own ghastly rhythms; and the war we pretended to control we never controlled. And we still don't. The violence was dropping fast before the surge was in place:
The single worst month for civilian deaths was December 2006, two months before the buildup’s first brigade arrived. Casualties dropped slightly in January. In February, when the first new brigade arrived, the recorded casualties dropped by a quarter, though it is the shortest month. Around that time, Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, decamped to Iran, perhaps fearing American troops. What the documents suggest strongly is that Iraqis themselves were looking for an escape from the orgy of sectarian killing made worse by the growth of ordinary, but still violent, crime.
There's no doubt that the US military were admirably able to take advantage of these internal dynamics. But the narrative that official Washington has tried to perpetrate – that the war was "ended" by more US troops – is simply untrue. The war was burning itself out before more troops arrived; the surge failed to use this lull to construct a multi-sectarian democratic government (which was its own criterion for success); the current forces pit a Sadr-Maliki Shiite government against increasingly alienated Sunnis now re-aligning with al Qaeda, and possibly also against the Kurds in the north, where tensions are rising again and could easily spiral into a civil war as US troops leave.
What Petraeus achieved was a face-saving withdrawal. That was all.
If that face-saving encourages the US to stay in Iraq with any serious presence for much longer, we will be dragged back into a conflict we now have a rare chance to extricate ourselves from, a conflict our incompetent invasion made possible.
We must learn this lesson: the US is a terrible neo-imperialist power. This whole enterprise designed to rid the world of danger has increased danger in the world; an attempt to end a torture regime led to widespread torture by Iraqi government forces, and, of course, by the US itself; a bid to encourage democracy will in all likelihood lead to either chaos or a Shiite strongman; an endeavor seeking to weaken Iran has ended in empowering it.
These are conservative lessons, not liberal ones – of the hellish consequences of good intentions in places we do not understand and cannot control. And if we continue to delude ourselves in the same way about Afghanistan, we will not just be imprudent.
By repeating what we know to have failed, we will be edging close to the classical definition of insanity.
(Photo: Military helicopters fly over the Green Zone area in Baghdad following a loud explosion early on October 18, 2010. By Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty.)
John Cookson explains why women make better politicians:
[A]n ongoing study by Sarah Anzia at Stanford University and Christopher Berry at the University of Chicago has found that districts served by women legislators are at a distinct advantage over those represented by men: U.S. congresswomen bring home roughly 9 percent more discretionary spending than congressmen.
As a result, districts that elect women to the House of Representatives receive, on average, about $49 million more each year. The report finds that bringing home more federal dollars and benefits doesn't hurt women legislators' performance in policy-making—congresswomen sponsor more bills and obtain more co-sponsorships for their legislation than their male colleagues do.
I wonder what percentage of these "Lost" Catholics feel like I do, that we did not leave the Church, but rather, the Church left us. I believe every single word of the Creed and I believe in transubstantiation and in the Immaculate Conception and pretty much every important article of faith in the Catechism. I don't believe in intolerance and hate because that's not the path that Jesus sets out for us in the Gospels. But I found more and more that the Church was increasingly intolerant and hateful towards any number of groups when they should be leading the call to love our neighbors.
I hung in for a long while, thinking that fighting from within was the way to go, but I ultimately realized that it was damaging my relationship with God and my relationship with myself and I felt no choice but to leave. It was never the faith I had trouble with. I know this is true for many people I've talked with, including several members of my family. It was not a decision any of us made lightly.
Sue Hubbard reviews the Gauguin exhibit at the Tate Modern:
The thinking that drove Gauguin to Tahiti, that lead Joseph Conrad to write about the Congo and D. H. Lawrence to become fascinated with Mexico was the same. The development of the idea of the ‘Orient’ as an unspecified local, an imaginative space fed by explorers’ tales and the visions of poets and artists, fitted very much with the mood of the late 19th century.
Such ‘exotic’ locations stood in opposition to the restrictions and repressions of bourgeois (largely white) western society. Here the real and the imaginary, the civilised and the primitive could be woven together into a construct where erotic drives and sexual impulses, normally buried beneath a veneer of civilised behaviour, could be legitimised. … What Gauguin really discovered was that his study of the ‘primitive’ brought him back to himself and that by defining what was ‘other’ he could begin to unpick who he really was.
Tina Rosenberg and David Bornstein relay the story of reliable transportation and maintenance, and how it can save lives:
Until 2008 [health assistant Tsepo] Kotelo could visit only three villages a week, because he had to reach them on foot, walking for miles and miles. But in February of that year, Kotelo got a motorcycle – the best vehicle for reaching rural villages in Africa, most of which are nowhere near a real road. Just as crucial, he was given the tools to keep the bike on the road: he received a helmet and protective clothing, he was taught to ride and trained to start each day with a quick check of the bike. His motorcycle is also tuned up monthly by a technician who comes to him.
Now, instead of spending his days walking to his job, he can do his job. Instead of visiting three villages each week, he visits 20. Where else can you find a low-tech investment in health care that increases patient coverage by nearly 600 percent? …
[Riders For Health] dramatizes the importance of paying attention to the scruffy and mundane parts of a system, especially delivery. Businesses understand this. If Federal Express didn’t maintain its trucks, it would go bankrupt. The same applies to social interventions.
barrel spending to new heights in the Bush years – boasted about stimulus projects in their own districts. I'm sorry but I do not believe the stimulus package was impossible for small-c conservatives to support in some measure, given the crisis we were facing. And so the monolithic Republican opposition in the president's first weeks in office was not a sign of Obama's sudden leftism, but of their profound and self-centered cynicism.
She originally embraced it, even wearing sweatshirts championing it.
Sue Hubbard 
The Dish 