Chart Of The Day

Grand Juries

Aaron Blake highlights a poll finding “that 60 percent of Americans disagree with the lack of an indictment against officer Daniel Pantaleo”:

Although 40 percent disagree “strongly” with there being no indictment in Garner’s case, just 24 percent say the same about the case in Ferguson. And in Ferguson, there’s majority support — 52 percent — for no indictment. So basically, Americans as a whole favor no indictment in Ferguson. In Garner’s case, they overwhelmingly think there should have been one. And in fact, just one-quarter of Americans agree with the grand jury’s decision not to indict.

This suggests, does it not, that the gloomiest assessments of America’s ability to see through race are too dire. If we were truly racially polarized, we’d see similar responses to similar white-cop-black-victim scenarios. Which means we have some common ground to stand on.

The Closing Of The Back-Of-The-Book

Josh Chafetz mourns it:

[N]o one else in Washington, nor precious few outlets anywhere, does what Leon did with the back of the book. Leon cared about culture and about ideas, not as adornment, but as ends in themselves. And he cared enough to write passionately and to commission passionate pieces about them. In an era of click-bait, the TNR back of the book ran long-form, thoughtful pieces about the arts, about culture, about ideas and their histories. In an era of vanishing book reviews, the TNR back of the book routinely ran lengthy reviews of books one might not otherwise encounter. In an era of laid-off critics, the TNR back of the book had a deep bench of drama, art, music, dance and literature critics. In a city obsessed with “winning” the 24-hour news cycle, the TNR back of the book played a much, much longer game.

Think for a second about what has happened to book reviews. Most newspapers got rid of them years ago. Try finding them on the NYT app. With TNR’s back-of-the-book gone, we’re left with a few pages in The New Yorker, the TLS, the wonderful New York Review of Books (but that institution too seems vulnerable, given its aging leadership), and a bunch of newish cultural outlets that vie for attention when TNR could command it. Everything else is Amazon and stars. But the review section is not just a feature; it’s part of a critical eco-system that sustains a higher culture in a democracy. Losing it can be fatal to a democracy that hopes to rise above mass-cult.

In my time at TNR, I wrote for both the front and the back, and no one seemed to mind. In fact, you were expected to be a reporter or political writer who could always dip your toes into the high culture of the back-of-the-book. I also had the privilege of being the second-in-command at the back of the book for a while. There are too many stories to tell, but I always revered that section and protected it almost as fiercely as Leon did. We became estranged for lots of reasons – and Dishhead will be aware of the long-running feud (another characteristic of TNR-style journalism). But we were and are as one on the role of high culture in our democracy, even if I sometimes felt that TNR’s literary section was sometimes unnecessarily obscurantist and impenetrable on purpose. Alyssa remembers “the publication’s simple confidence that culture was an important subject that required no justification to sell to readers”:

You didn’t have to have a policy hook, or even the draw of Misty Copeland’s rising star, to write about dance there, as Jennifer Homans, the magazine’s dance editor who resigned [Friday], did so beautifully. Culture could provide answers that policy analysis could not, as it did in Rebecca Traister’s marvelous “I Don’t Care If You Like It,” a synthesis that drew on everything from Esquire’s beauty metrics to Amy Poehler’s rebellious, dirty sense of humor, to the criminalization of parenting to explain how women have been kept subject to men’s opinions. I return to that piece at least once a week. I don’t necessarily agree with Jed Perl on the politicization of art, but we are of accord that the fate of art matters even if it shifts no policies.

This is a philosophy that guides a lot of more general-interest publications, including the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books where Daniel Mendelsohn, among my favorite living critics, brings the same attention to Greek poetry and the spasms of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” on Broadway. But it’s a bit rarer, I think, among Washington publications that think of themselves as policy-oriented, or in sections like op-ed pages where culture yields pride of place to policy and politics.

Damon Linker calls Leon “one of the greatest editors in the history of American letter”:

From 1983, when he took over the back of the book, through the early years of the 2000s, Wieseltier’s pages were just about the only game in town for serious writing about culture. Only The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, each with a couple dozen reviews in every issue, came close to matching the cultural heat and light that Wieseltier managed to generate with a handful of essays and reviews, and a modest budget, in nearly every issue of TNR.

Today the cultural landscape is different. Not only are old-media opinion journals (The Nation, for example) publishing much smarter and unpredictable review essays than they used to, but there are a slew of digital outlets covering cultural topics in a variety of interesting ways — The Believer, n+1, The New Inquiry, Tablet Magazine, and many others — as well as old-time (Boston Review) and new-fangled (LA Review of Books) cultural journals whose content can be easily and instantly accessed online.

The question, as always, is whether the increased quantity will match (let alone surpass) the quality Wieseltier managed to achieve in issue after issue of TNR.

Cynthia Haven is pessimistic:

At this point, saving TNR will not be done by will alone. It takes more than ideology and snark to produce something that endures. You cannot buy gravitas, any more than you can buy reputation. What’s missing is what Czesław Miłosz used to call “piety” – a feeling of hierarchy of value in works of art and works of literature – or perhaps what Susan Sontag called “an education of the heart.”

It has less to do with education and more with a certain amount of living, suffering, patience, tenacity, endurance, wisdom, and the willingness to pay, pay, pay (and I don’t mean with cash). My concern is that people such as Hughes and Vidra have no idea what it means to be caretakers of a century-old literary institution.

Or maybe they’ll learn.

Did Jackie Not Want Her Story Told?

Rape survivor Jade Reindl argues that “Jackie”, the victim at the center of Sabrina Rudin Erdely’s disputed Rolling Stone piece about rape at the University of Virginia, was violated a second time when she asked Erdely to remove her from the story and Erdely refused:

Here’s the thing about rape that most people seem to get: it’s violating. It requires a lack of consent. It’s an event full of pain and regret. Here’s the thing about sharing a rape victim’s story without their permission that most people don’t seem to get: It’s violating. It requires a lack of consent. It’s an event full of pain and regret.

If someone agreed to have sex with you earlier in the day, but when it came time to actually do it they no longer consented, and you had sex with them anyway, was it rape? When you share the story of a rape victim without her consent, even if she formerly consented, it is a complete re-violation of her personal space and narrative. It doesn’t matter why Jackie, the subject of Rolling Stone’s article about UVA and sexual assault, later retracted her statements. And the aim of this article is not to justify or analyze her hesitation. What I’m saying is this: By publishing an article that the victim retracted her support of, Rolling Stone essentially violated Jackie, and every other survivor, all over again.

Sarah Kliff also considers this an ethical violation on Erdely’s part:

Publishing a story about a rape victim against her will is dangerous, and arguably unethical, journalism.

It goes completely against the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma, a respected advisory group at Columbia University’s Journalism School, guidelines for how to report on sexual assault. There is an entire section that directs reporters to “respect a potential interviewee’s right to say no.”

“Be fair and realistic. Don’t coerce, cajole, trick or offer remuneration,” the guidelines instruct. If Rolling Stone published the story against Jackie’s will, that is a terrible mistake on the magazine’s part — and a violation of the ethical guidelines reporters should follow when reporting difficult, and sensitive stories about rape. And it’s coupled with the fact that Rolling Stone didn’t track down the accused rapists.

In Hanna Rosin’s view, in a post we noted last night, one of Erdely’s biggest errors was in making a promise to Jackie that she, as a journalist, should not have kept:

Jackie told the Post that she felt “manipulated” by Erdely. She said that she was “overwhelmed” by sitting through interviews with her and asked to be taken out of the story, but Erdely said it would go forward anyway. Jackie said she “felt completely out of control of my own story.” Erdely has implied that she made an agreement with Jackie that she would tell her story but not try to contact her assailants. Rolling Stone explained in their statement today: “Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie’s story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her.”

Such agreements are apparently not uncommon. In survivors’ groups, advocates advise victims to strike these kinds of deals with reporters so they don’t lose control of their own stories, or anger their assailants, both of which they consider paramount to healing. But this creates an impossible situation for journalists: Ask too many questions and you lose your source. But don’t ask enough and you end up in this situation, with a story that’s falling apart.

But what really puzzles Rosin is that the account Jackie’s friends gave to the WaPo last week, though very different from the one Jackie told Erdely, was more than horrible enough to get the point across:

The baffling thing here is, if what Jackie told Andy is true, that would have made an explosive enough story about campus sexual violence. A group of men force a freshman to perform oral sex. She reports it to the university and they don’t investigate. That’s a disturbing story. But if Andy is to be believed, that means Jackie told an exaggerated story to Erdely, and that Erdely was all too happy to create an even more perfect victim, one who was brutally gang raped and then left at the curb by her so called friends, thus further traumatizing her, and leaving her to fend for herself in a culture too backward for progressive thought.

Too-good-to-leave-unembellished. Libby Nelson wonders if Jackie was properly informed of what she was getting herself into:

If a journalist were completely honest with a source about what it means to be interviewed for this sort of story, it would go something like this: you are going to tell me about the worst day of your life, because you think there is value in sharing that story with the rest of the world. You need to trust me, but you need to know I am not your friend. I will seem as sympathetic as I can be, but I will also note the exact moment you start crying so I can write about it. I will ask questions that might make you uncomfortable. I will call other people and tell them what you’re saying about them. I will open you up to the judgment of the entire world. And then I will walk away. And if you aren’t ready to deal with that, you shouldn’t talk to me.

I don’t know if anyone would consent to that. And I don’t know if I could really shoot myself in the foot with that much honesty. No decent human wants to appear to doubt the word of a rape victim. But if you don’t do that work in private, you make it that much easier for the rest of the world to do it in public. That’s what Rolling Stone — and Jackie — are about to learn.

Like Rosin, Peter Suderman suspects Erdely of erasing the line between journalism and advocacy:

Advocates for rape victims and sexual assault awareness understandably tend to prioritize support, communication, and community building; they do not have a great responsibility to doubt, to verify, and to rigorously check all the minute details of the accounts they hear or share. But journalists do. To be sure, this sort of checking is almost always difficult, time-consuming, and stressful. Inevitably, some mistakes will be made (I’ve certainly made a few regretful errors of my own). There are tradeoffs between time and accuracy. But the more sensational the story, the more shocking and potentially consequential its allegations, the more that effort is necessary—especially with a long-form account that is not under the pressures and deadlines of daily journalism, and especially when the subject and major source of the story tries to back out, as Jackie apparently did.

The way Morrissey sees it, that’s the core of the problem:

[T]he damage wasn’t limited to just “Jackie.” The fraternities at UVa got shut down for no good reason, the one fraternity named got vandalized on top of that, and several men came under suspicion for a crime that they not only didn’t commit but maynot have happened at all. That is what happens when activists hijack journalism to further their agenda at the expense of the truth, a value which clearly wasn’t a high priority for either Erdely or anyone at Rolling Stone. If the truth had been their agenda, they would have doubled their efforts to make sure their story was solid, rather than simply act as stenographers for someone who told Erdely what she not only wanted to hear, but actively campaigned to find.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper, on the other hand, blames Rolling Stone and the magazine industry writ large for preferring sensationalism over facts:

There are few industries as cynical and craven as magazine publishing. They love a good sex scandal or true crime story. You can watch out for the next longform piece of a college campus rape story that’s corroborated. Do not believe for A SECOND that Rolling Stone did not speak to alleged rapists because they were trying to be “sensitive”. It was because they were abiding by a bad promise they made to “Jackie” to not contact her alleged assailants. If they did contact those supposed assailants, they would lose a sensational and lurid first person account of a gang rape. If Jackie rescinded her claims, then the magazine would lose its hook to lure readers into a story about the much-reported — and possibly inflated — “epidemic” of sexual assaults on campus.

Where Are The Sugar-Daddies Of Yore?

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Chris Hughes wants to turn a profit:

At the heart of the conflict of the past few days is a divergent view on how the New Republic — and journalism more broadly — will survive. In one view, it is a “public trust” and not a business. It is something greater than a commercial enterprise, ineffable, an ideal that cannot be touched. Financially, it would be a charity. There is much experimentation in nonprofit journalism – ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are proving the model — and that may be the right path for certain institutions. At the New Republic, I believe we owe it to ourselves and to this institution to aim to become a sustainable business and not position ourselves to rely on the largesse of an unpredictable few. Our success is not guaranteed, but I think it’s critical to try.

This is relatively new in the history of persons of sugar. And I don’t think it’s because Hughes is somehow a different sort of mogul than those in days gone by, just that the incentives have shifted rather dramatically in a very short period of time. The truth is: when there were only a handful of magazines that had a monopoly on opinion journalism, owning one gave you a real cultural gate-keeper power. It was worth losing money for the huge gains in influence you received in return, the social status, access to the powerful and pursuit of a cause. You could shape the discourse around your pet causes, and alter and shape the debate in ways no one – outside the Kochs and liberal ad-buyers – now can. This was a bad thing in some respects – the debate about Israel, for example, was far less open and diverse than today – and a few men (and they were almost all men) really shouldn’t be able to wield that kind of influence in a democracy. But it also provided a way for great writing and sharp thinking to endure. As a simple formula, it worked. And owners were relatively happy.

Fast-forward to today and the benefits of owning TNR or the Atlantic or the Nation have all but evaporated. There is no incentive for cultural gate-keepers any more, because there are no gates to keep. Anyone with an Internet connection can reach a mass audience, and the power and prestige that once accrued to a publisher are thereby eviscerated. You end up where Hughes ended up: spending millions to fund ornery, if talented, writers, and wondering what’s in it for you. Sure, you get to interview the president once in a while. Maybe you can get Nancy Pelosi to come to your wedding. But, once that thrill is gone, what’s left … but a giant headache and a company that hemorrhages money?

In response to my hankering for the TNR of old, Dreher argues that there is “no way to be that kind of magazine today and make money. Maybe there never was”:

[W]hen people like Freddie de Boer, a true leftist, sneer from a left-wing perspective at the demise of TNR, I understand where he’s coming from and don’t begrudge him his opinion. But I think he shouldn’t be quite so confident, because the same dynamic that’s brought TNR down threatens all small magazines of opinion in this country. I would be surprised if any of us could pay our bills on subscriptions and ad sales alone. We depend on the generosity of donors — many of them wealthy and public-spirited — who believe that the work we do is important, even if it is not money-making.

Somebody said yesterday that TNR doesn’t need a better business model, it needs a better owner. Yes, exactly. I don’t know how many rich people are willing to subsidize a money-losing journalistic operation out of principle and for the common good, but we sure need to find them.

Chait makes related points in response to Ezra:

The odd thing about Klein’s column is that, other than this small disagreement about TNR’s character, I cannot find anything in it with which I disagree. He straightforwardly described the problem of highbrow magazines that serve a public-interest function and have always lost money. He proceeds from that accurate description straight to the conclusion in his headline — TNR must change — without explaining why. One could just as easily conclude that TNR will always lose money, and its value should be assessed in non-market terms and subsidized accordingly by a willing donor.

That unacknowledged leap of logic contains nearly all our disagreement. It seems to be rooted in a deep faith in the power of the free market when it comes to media. Klein has always been very explicit about his view that media functions that earn money are good …

That sort of market fundamentalism is largely associated with the political right. You can find traces of it on the center-left among the winners of the new media economy, like many otherwise-liberal winners of other sectors of the new economy. They implicitly associate success with virtue. They may understand that an institution like The New Republic creates externalities that are not captured through market value, but this factor does not intrude upon their model.

Yet the fact that TNR does not meet a market need does not mean it serves no purpose. The main thing it needed to change was its owner.

There is a middle ground, of course, and it seems to me that TNR’s staff were prepared to find it. A magazine that has no interest in paying its way becomes a sad vanity publication. But a magazine that can pay for the bulk of its operations but still needs some sugar-money to keep it afloat is a perfectly good model for a place whose standards and intellectual heft will never make it a mass publication. And it remains a good model. It’s just that few of the super-rich today really respect that model, or have even a crude interest in sustaining it.

(Image from The Federalist)

A World Awash In Cheap Oil

Michael Specter fears that low oil prices will persist:

Many environmentalists had assumed that if neither fear nor reason helped us to lessen our reliance on oil, then at least we could count on scarcity. But scarcity is not an economic or environmental policy. Humans have long had a habit of expecting the sky to fall. Yet from Malthus to Paul Ehrlich, predictions that the planet was on the verge of starvation have never come to pass (or at least not as broadly as expected). Nonetheless, the drop in oil prices comes at a terrible moment. Last month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that our only chance to halt the rising temperature of the Earth, and to prevent the calamity that rise will cause, would be to eliminate fossil-fuel emissions by the end of the century.

A plan to end U.S. fossil-fuel dependence would be an unlikely goal in any case, but, if oil remains easily accessible, it becomes politically impossible. “It is technically feasible to transition to a low-carbon economy,” Youba Sokona, the co-chair of one of the I.P.C.C.’s working groups, says. “But what is lacking are appropriate policies and institutions. The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost to adapt and mitigate climate change.”

Ronald Bailey hears that oil may remain cheap:

During the last decade, even as alarums about the advent of “peak oil” grew ever more frenzied, world oil production actually increased from 77.6 million barrels per day in 2003 to 86.8 million barrels per day in 2013. Lynch’s book The “Peak Oil” Scare and the Coming Oil Flood, scheduled for publication this coming spring, predicts even larger leaps in the global production of crude. Lynch thinks world oil production will increase to around 110 million barrels per day during the next decade. In the meantime, global oil prices will hover around $60 per barrel over the next couple of years and conceivably drop to $40 per barrel in five years. At $40 per barrel, the price of oil would, in inflation-adjusted dollars, just about equal the annual average price of $17 per barrel in 1998.

I asked Lynch if this meant oil markets might be in for a replay of the price collapse that occurred in the 1980s. He replied that he thought so. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the price of oil reached its peak annual average of $106 per barrel in 1980 and then collapsed to an annual average of $30.80 per barrel in 1986.

Jordan Weissmann sees some advantages to the low prices – beyond more money in the pockets of consumers:

Right now, the band of small and midsized oil companies that have fracked their way to riches aren’t the most efficient or strategic bunch. As one executive put it in 2010, the early days of the boom were mostly driven by “brute force and ignorance” as drillers tried to get crude out of the ground as fast as possible. That approach has led to lots of poorly structured wells that quickly run dry on oil and wasted effort fracking shale deposits that don’t produce much to begin with. When prices for oil were lofty, the industry could afford to be that sloppy. With prices sinking, however, it will be forced to improve its methods. That could be good for the environment. Fracking involves pumping a toxic mix of water, chemicals, and sand into shale deposits to crack them, and the more sparingly it’s used, the fewer problems it creates. A more cautious industry could also be good for investors, who would see less of their money sunk into failed wells.

When Silicon Valley Dabbles In Journalism

In response to TNR’s implosion, Lucia Moses considers why applying tech solutions to media so often ends in tears:

“They’ve arrived from Mars with the typical arrogance of a tourist, over-noticing the wrong things,” said Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review. “If there were a simple solution, smart people like me would have done it. Publishing is an extremely fidgety business with a direct cost, a base that is in many cases unwilling to pay for the product, and an indirect audience in marketers and advertisers who have found increasing efficiencies, which have driven down CPMs.”

Apart from that, it’s a great industry to work in! McArdle compares media and tech industries:

In many ways, a company such as Facebook and eBay is the opposite of a media company.

Those companies have huge network effects, and they get their content for free or nearly free. Making a lot of money out of a business like that is hard — many more attempts have failed than succeeded. But a prestige media company makes expensive content that has zero network effects; you can’t copyright a fact. In the new digital world, hours after your expensively reported story is out, dozens of other outlets will have re-reported the same facts and taken some of the traffic. Making a lot of money out of a business like that is much more difficult. Chris Hughes was not insane to think that he could make something like a New Yorker for Washington. It was, however, pretty crazy to think that you could do so without losing a bunch of money.

You need only read the stories about FirstLook and The New Republic to understand how badly tech-style management assumptions translate into media. When that approach failed, spectacular public meltdowns ensued. So the new moguls now learn another key difference about the media business: You are always being closely watched, so communications, and effective crisis management, are supremely important. A spectacular HR crisis translates more directly into loss of reputation, and sales, than it does almost anywhere else.

Drezner is in the same ballpark:

I’ve heard a lot of nonprofit sector folk complaining that Silicon Valley investors want to revolutionize their field without really understanding it.

The pattern in each of these cases is that a fabulously wealthy and successful investor enters a new and not-terribly-successful sector and tries to apply the lessons learned from the investor’s past successes to this new area. Except that there’s not a ton of evidence that those lessons are truly generalizable. One almost wonders if there is an extension of the Peter Principle for investors.

The 73rd Most Disruptive Idea In History Is … Kitty Litter?

Paul Ford makes a compelling case:

Ed Lowe was working at his father’s delivery business in southern Michigan when he had a brilliant idea: take some fuller’s earth (a type of clay) and sell it to local farmers for chickens litter-heartto nest. He called it Chicken Litter. It was 1947. The farmers weren’t interested—which is why Lowe had a big pile of it when a local woman came by. She’d brought her cat in from the January cold and needed some sand for her cat box. On an impulse, Lowe offered her some fuller’s earth instead.  The stuff turned out to absorb the ammonia smell of cat pee. The woman soon came back for more. So did her friends. After enough requests, Lowe put some fuller’s earth in bags, wrote KITTY LITTER on them, and dropped them off at a hardware store. The product sold, and it sold in supermarkets and pet stores. The market grew ever outward, from southern Michigan to the world.

The introduction of Kitty Litter meant that after millennia of scratching at the door cats could come indoors and stay there. They had long been visitors in American homes; now they were residents. In some ways it has been a hostile takeover: There are millions more cats than dogs in the U.S. This also means that Lowe is the indirect father of countless Internet cat memes. Anyone who sells recreational laser pointers, fuzzy mice, scratching posts, cat furniture, or electric-fountain cat water dishes should thank him, too.

(Photo via Cheezburger.com)

Quote For The Day

“I have known cops who haven’t had a racist bone in their bodies and in fact had adopted black children, they went to black churches on the weekend; and these are white cops. They really weren’t overtly racist. They weren’t consciously racist. But you know what they had in their minds that made them act out and beat a black suspect unwarrantedly? They had fear. They were afraid of black men. I know a lot of white cops who have told me. And I interviewed over 900 police officers in 18 months and they started talking to me, it was almost like a therapy session for them I didn’t realize that they needed an outlet to talk,” – Constance Rice, civil rights attorney.

Leaving The Farm

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Alec D. Rogers reviews Edward Larson’s The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789, a portrait of our first president from the end of the Revolutionary War until he took office. Unlike many accounts that portray “a Washington who emerges from Mount Vernon only with the greatest reluctance to play out a script written by James Madison,” Larson gives us “a much more active and politically engaged Washington, who did as much as anyone during these years to bring the new republic into being”:

[Larson] shows us how Washington’s political savvy helped ensure that the Constitution would gain acceptance. The result was a product that closely resembled what, for years, Washington had been advocating in private.

At the crux of the story, though, is Larson’s explanation for why Washington ultimately abandoned a retirement from political life that he earnestly desired.

Larson makes the case that the political class of the time was sold on the need for reform of the Articles of Confederation, and that all agreed Washington’s active support was essential. But the key connective element is Washington’s own political thought and understanding of republican duty. As Glenn Phelps has noted in his study of Washington’s constitutional thought, Washington’s concept of republicanism was that of Greece and Rome: “Republican hagiography demanded that its heroes always be willing to defend the republic against corruption and decay. As much to confirm his own virtue as to attain specific reforms, Washington determined to end his public ‘retirement.’”

In an earlier review of the book, Steve Donaghue expressed regret regarding Larson’s “unwillingness to pin down this less-than-selfless side of his hero”:

His Washington is generally a Washington of whom Washington would have approved, with the man’s baser motivations kept discreetly in the background. This extends even to the choosing of the site for the seat of the national government; Washington and Madison worked hard to make sure the location of that new capital city was on the banks of the Potomac River, near Mount Vernon. As Larson somewhat innocently reports: “It lay at the midpoint of the country’s north-south axis and, if Washington’s company could open the upper Potomac for commercial navigation, at the terminus of the main route west.” It’s about as neutrally phrased as it could be.

Rather than being motivated by grubby financial concerns, Larson’s Washington is always the dispassionate and far-sighted statesman. He refuses to comment publicly during the new constitution’s lengthy ratification process, for instance, not because his personal vanity outweighed his respect for its republican virtues, but because “the Cincinnatus ideal demanded that he not seek power and taking sides now might limit his ability to serve as a unifying leader later”.

(Image: General George Washington Resigning His Commission by John Trumbull, via Wikimedia Commons)

Keeping Excessive Punishment In Check

Reihan sketches out a plan to do so:

What government routinely fails to do is account for the costs the criminal justice system imposes on the civilians who get caught in its web. Mark A.R. Kleiman, a public policy professor at UCLA and author of When Brute Force Fails, made this point vividly in a Democracy Journal essay published last spring. Instead of fixating on the dollar costs of running the criminal justice system, he asks that we also account for “the suffering inflicted by arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration, including all of the residual disabilities that go with the label ‘ex-convict,’ and the fear created by overaggressive policing.”

Imagine if, as Cardozo Law School professor Richard A. Bierschbach has suggested, we had in place a “punishment budget.”

Given such a budget, we would accept that the criminal justice system would cause some degree of suffering. At the same time, we’d insist that if you pass some measures that increase suffering in some way—say, by making more arrests—you’d have to reduce the sum total of suffering in some other way, for instance by reducing prison sentences for nonviolent offenders. This would impose a useful check on the creep of new laws, rules, and regulations that steadily increase the government’s coercive powers, as if on autopilot.

He also recommends getting “better, more reliable data on policing so that communities have a clear sense of what local law enforcement agencies are doing in their name.” Along the same lines, Josh Voorhees wants the president to “call for all law enforcement agencies to keep an accurate count of how many people the police kill each year”:

Without a formal and comprehensive reporting system, the president, lawmakers, and everyone else have no way of knowing the true scope of the problem. Even if the government is willing to believe that police officers are almost always justified when they kill suspects in the line of duty, Washington still owes the nation a full accounting of those killings that it has implicitly sanctioned. How can the president hope to limit the number of lives lost if he has no way of knowing how many lives are actually lost? How will Congress evaluate whether policies aimed at curbing police shootings are successful if it has no way of tracking the success or failure of those policies?