Month: December 2010

Reimagining Televised Debates

by Conor Friedersdorf

Ta-Nehisi Coates notes that television forces those who appear on it to argue "directly, and pointedly, in a short amount of time." This shapes how debates unfold because "concision actually favors the spouting of conventional thinking."

…let's say I go on television and say "We can salute the bravery of the Confederate Army, while deploring their aims." This is a fairly conventional point which relies on relatively established mores. They are, in this case, 1.) Slavery was bad 2.) The men who died at Gettysburg, Antietam, and Vicksburg on both sides, were brave. Or some such. Moreover it makes me sound fair-minded in my willingness to allow for a kind of moral out for all sides, regardless of their sympathies. 

But let's say I go on television and say, "Confederate bravery is neither unique, nor in and of itself, praise-worthy. Mohammad Atta was brave. The kamikazes were brave. But bravery in service of evil should never be commemorated." This is a problem. Even in writing it, I've had to take up more space then the previous assertion. Likely, I could edit it down to a sentence or two. But I leave it this way to show how much space and time it takes me to make the more contentious point, one that challenges our accepted thinking, (the 9/11 bombers were brave) and leaves no room for an honorable retreat.
Would this problem be solved if we stopped thinking of televised debate as something that is supposed to happen live? Imagine if written debates unfolded in real time via live chats and were presented to the audience as they unfolded. The quality of thought would suffer tremendously, as would the reader experience.

What if a television network tried to run a debate show like the back-and-forths that sometimes occur in print? I'd be assigned a CNN producer, who would help me to produce an opening argument on a given issue. That two minute clip, complete with polished argument and visual elements to complement it, would be sent to my sparring partner, who would produce her own rebuttal. Perhaps it could unfold over three rounds. Viewers could vote for the winner at the end. The whole exchange might take 10 or 15 minutes. And if executed correctly, the quality of argument and entertainment would be far better than any of the talking head exchanges currently broadcast on cable.

Moore Award Nominee, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

John Cole protests his nomination:

Do you think they understood the point of my post last night? Like, for example, the people on “teh left” who are all nominated for awards are basically folks with no institutional power, and whose grave sins range from saying fuck too much and pointing out that wingnuts are crazy? That it is absurd to equate a bunch of slightly obnoxious comments from random bloggers to the Malkin awards, which is a list of individuals who make up the institutional right. When was the last time Digby was on television? Or Tbogg? Or Amanda Marcotte? Do they understand that Markos is essentially blacklisted from NBC?

Do they even understand the concept of false equivalence?

The Dish spent much more time this year tracking vitriolic right-wing rhetoric than left-wing rhetoric. I went through all of this year's nominees and there were roughly ten times as many Malkin nominees as Moore nominees. And don't forget that there is a second category for right-wing bile – the Hewitt Award.  If there wasn't an award for extreme left-wing vindictiveness, the contrast between left and right Cole fixates on wouldn't be evident. And while I agree that this year's Malkin nominees are generally more extreme than the Moore nominees, that doesn't make the Moore nominees defensible. The Dish isn't going to shy away from pointing out liberal intemperateness and divisiveness just because the other side is currently worse. 

Wishing death upon your political enemies isn't kosher –even if your words are dripping with sarcasm, you're riffing off an old Dave Weigel quote, and you're targeting someone as loathsome as Bill Kristol.  Is that such a crazy standard to keep?

Immigration And Inequality

by Conor Friedersdorf

Mickey Kaus has a proposal:

If you're worried about incomes at the bottom… one solution leaps out at you. It's a solution that worked, at least in the late 1990s under Bill Clinton, when wages at the low end of the income ladder rose fairly dramatically. The solution is tight labor markets. Get employers bidding for scarce workers and you'll see incomes rise across the board without the need for government aid programs or tax redistribution. A major enemy of tight labor markets at the bottom is also fairly clear: unchecked immigration by undocumented low-skilled workers. It's hard for a day laborer to command $18 an hour in the market if there are illegals hanging out on the corner willing to work for $7. Even experts who claim illlegal immigration is good for Americans overall admit that it's not good for Americans at the bottom. In other words, it's not good for income equality.

Odd, then that Obama, in his "war on inequality," hasn't made a big effort to prevent illegal immigration–or at least to prevent illegal immigrration from returning with renewed force should the economy recover.

Will Wilkinson objects:

This is badly misleading. A move to United States is an upwardly mobile move for almost all low-skilled immigrant workers, and it tends to reduce inequality on the whole. As a matter of description, Mr Kaus' conclusion follows only if we grant him the premise that the trend in inequality is best measured by looking at the set of people inside a country's borders at one point in time and then comparing it to the set of people inside the country's borders at a later point in time. I propose we reject this premise…

The only reason to make the within-borders population of a nation-state our analytical touchstone is a prior commitment to the idea that the nation-state is the correct unit of normative evaluation. That is to say, an unacknowledged commitment to moral nationalism tends to stand behind the sort of analytical nationalism driving Mr Kaus' inequality accounting trick.

Though I agree with Wilkinson that immigration reduces global inequality – and share his preference for laws that allow more immigrants into the United States – he is flat wrong when he asserts that moral nationalism is the only reason to care about economic inequality within a single nation-state. One coherent reason to fear intra-country inequality: large disparities in wealth might undermine democracy as the poorest citizens wield an ever-shrinking amount of political access, insider savvy, or power (see Bell, California).

People like Kaus argue that economic inequality, while not problematic in itself, excacerbates social inequality, which we ought to care about. (A weakness in his position: wouldn't amnesty for illegal immigrants dramatically increase social equality within the United States? I'm pretty sure he'd respond that amnesty would lead to more illegal immigration and thus ultimately reduce social inequality.)

A third coherent reason: economic inequality eventually results in egalitarian efforts and government programs that critics find undesirable, whether out of principled aversion to redistribution or a prudential concern that these efforts vest the federal government with too much power.

I'd be fascinated to see Kaus and Wilkinson debate immigration as it pertains to social inequality.

Follow The Money

by Patrick Appel

Howard Gleckman is still pessimistic about comprehensive tax reform. He thinks "tax reform is going to happen, and relatively soon," but "not in Obama's first term." Among his reasons for holding this belief:

We have learned a lot in recent weeks about who funded those non-profit outfits that plowed tens of millions of anonymous money into this year’s congressional campaigns. And much of the cash that found its way into the coffers of successful GOP candidates came from two sources: Wall Street and energy producers—among the biggest beneficiaries of special interest tax breaks. These folks paid good money to protect their subsidies. And I suspect they’ll get what they paid for.

A Poem For Wednesday

Nevada

by Zoe Pollock

"On the Liquidation of the Mustang Ranch by the Internal Revenue Service" by X.J. Kennedy appeared in The Atlantic in 1991:

This poor old spread, its waterholes turned dust,

     Its paying herd stampeded, lies here slain.

     On Reno's rock-shanked hills frustrated rain

Refuses to descend. Spangles of rust

Bestride the bar where hands no longer shake

     Quick daiquiris to blur the fear of AIDS,

     Net stockings dangle hollow, grand parades

Kick off no more. A hibernating snake

Lies not more still. Beneath the auctioneer's

     Gavel fall crates of condoms, lingerie,

     The sign from the mirrored orgy chamber: FIRE

EXIT, the kindly tank of oxygen

     Whose sweet breath could that reveler inspire

To flare, who might have smoldered in dismay.

(Image by Flickr user Satosphere)

Question Of The Week: “Auntie Mame” And “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I thought about this question for a long time. 

I could go for the insightful philosophical treatise, the cogent historical argument, the incisive political indictment, but the truth is that there are two books, both of which I read when I was about ten years old, that had long-lasting and thorough effects on me; one, perhaps, even more than the other.  They are Patrick Dennis' novel Auntie Mame and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Both of these books showed me a version of the world–an approach to life–that was utterly outside everything in my limited midwestern experience.  They offered me an approach to life–"Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving" and "Furthur"–that opened up possibilities hitherto unimagined.  I had had a very conventional 1960s childhood, and suddenly the world outside my door seemed wider and wilder and more beautiful than anything had led me to believe.

I think Mame had more of a long-lasting effect because 1) we moved east rather than west, to a NJ town just outside of Manhattan, about a year after I'd read both of them, and 2) most of the possibilities Mame offered were unlikely to land me in prison.  Also, Mame presented a sophistication and open-mindedness, a true liberality, that Kesey didn't really offer, as his troupe became more inverted as Wolfe's tale wound on.  When I would come into the city, I would see the places and things Dennis wrote about.  I was desperate for an Auntie Mame of my own, to break me out of my family's mold of conventionality, but it took me until I hit my 20s and was living in NYC myself to find the world that Dennis described.  There were only traces of the literal world he wrote about, but there were plenty of the metaphorical landmarks left.  I was always sorry not to have a guide through it all, or to have a chance to live it at an earlier and more formative stage. I've just given a copy of Auntie Mame to my 12-year-old nephew, in hopes that it will open his mind and heart to possibilities in similar fashion.

Question Of The Week: “High Fidelity”

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

I have read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera but I have to say the film and book that has made the biggest perceptible impact on my life is High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. I know that might not sound weighty but bear with me.  I was 18 when I first saw the movie and a few months into my first serious relationship with girl who I dated for 6 years and have been married to for the past four.

To me the protagonist, Rob Gordon, served as the Ghost of Christmas Future.  I could see myself as afraid of commitment, always looking for the girl who didn't have boring underwear and so on.  I learned from the film that no relationship is perfect and they all take work.  There is no such thing as some magical connection because love is about two people making each other happy rather than some perfect woman to match all of my moods and meet every single expectation.

Our relationship hasn't always been perfect. We lived two and a half hours apart throughout college and her first year of grad school. We had moments when we were bored of each other or tired of working hard to communicate and connect.  That is the moral of the story though… no relationship is perfect: "Believe me, I mean, I could do a top five things about her that drive me crazy but it's just your garden variety women you know, schizo stuff and that's the kind of thing that got me here."
 
Our relationship has been wonderful and it has gotten better throughout the years.  The effort we put in to be together has paid off and my life has been enriched in so many ways because of my lovely wife and I honestly do not think we would have made it were it not for the lessons I learned from that story.