In defense of Cass Sunstein

Cass Sunstein, a lawyer and former professor at The University of Chicago Law School, has been appointed by his friend Barack Obama to be the new director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a heretofore obscure job that Sunstein, one of the nation's leading public intellectuals, will no doubt make into a think tank influencing the full regulatory sweep of the Obama Administration. In a prolific career, Sunstein has ranged far beyond the law, writing books on FDR's fostering of new economic rights, the influence digital technology is having on democracy, and the roots of radical extremism. At the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Chicago in 2007, I heard Sunstein give a brilliant talk on the dynamics of group polarization (the kind of thing sociologists would study) and its role in creating terrorists. Sunstein's mind is supple and his writing is very accessible, two traits that the new president no doubt finds appealing.

On Hullabaloo yesterday (one of the major political blogs on the left, http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/), digby tore into Sunstein after confessing that she knew little about his work. Mischaracterizing it based on comments from other bloggers, she punished him for, among other things, suggesting that regulatory control should shift to the extent possible from coercive measures to incentives, and claimed that this meant it might as well be coming from the usual free market-worshipping conservative playbook. So much for trying to ascertain where a writer or thinker is actually situated along a spectrum of views from left to right (to the extent that that spectrum is still descriptively useful). For digby, if Sunstein is willing to think about modifying traditional regulatory schemes in order to coax markets toward outcomes consistent with national policy, rather than simply order them to comply, it means he's a right-winger in disguise. Apparently she's not willing to let Obama's people explore any fresh policy alternatives if they are not branded and vetted as issuing from the playbook on the other side of the ideological spectrum, which is presumably the one that worships command economies and state dictation of commercial life.

For another view of Cass Sunstein, it's useful to consider his ideas about political extremism in the context of the search -- in which Western foreign affairs ministries and law enforcement agencies are engaged -- for new long-term policies that might help curb terrorism, inasmuch as existing policies, on which enormous sums have been spent in recent years and which have required vast deployment of military forces, don't seem to have discouraged terrorist networks from replenishing their ranks. Sunstein has written a bracing book ("Going to Extremes") on one dimension of the subject: how radical extremism is incubated. Bringing behavioral psychology and political sociology to his analysis, Sunstein offers crucial support to the fundamental progressive understanding that radical groups hijack legitimate political grievances and that unless those who have those grievances see that extreme violence is likely to hurt and not help their causes, and that there are alternative ways to fight for their rights, there will continue to be a market for that violence. Clearly, Sunstein is a thinker so much more adept than most of the so-called conservative intellectuals that his appointment signifies that Obama wants not only to govern differently, he wants to extinguish the hold of the conservative paradigm on the political class.

Admittedly, Sunstein is not a predictable, programmatically minded social democrat, so if you deplore those who believe that effective government need not be "bigger government" -- which is to say, if you agree with conservatives that the debate about government should be about its size rather than its efficacy -- you won't be able to see how useful Sunstein's work is, in the struggle to rebuild a national consensus about the importance of public action, public resources, public regulation and public well-being. No new president, merely by being elected, can suddenly announce a new political order that everyone will happily embrace. Part of creating a new order involves changing the way people think. And that requires dismantling the default beliefs of conservatives, which have become the default beliefs of the political class. Conservatives have been "drugging the public mind" (a great phrase of Lincoln's, about Southern slave-holders' defense of states' rights) for two generations now. Sunstein has been a great ally in undermining the premises of their ideas.

It's not time "to scream bloody murder"...

Many vocal progressive bloggers seem to believe that Barack Obama is revealing himself -- by his appointments and his willingness to evaluate entitlement programs -- to be a closet conservative. One commenter on a major blog today insisted that "it's time to scream bloody murder" about Obama. The tendency of progressives to do this -- indeed, the habit of doing it, so well-developed (and well-motivated) during the Bush years -- is self-marginalizing when it comes to influencing the thinking of independent and not especially partisan voters whose support gave Obama such a decisive, mandate-creating majority last November. Obama obviously intends to reinforce and expand that mandate, and he's succeeding in doing so. Government is not merely a policymaking picnic, followed by spending programs. A president can't get change out of a democracy without developing and sustaining reliable popular support that will help him or her command the heights of governing, so that the elaborate, creaky, balky functioning of government -- legislative as well as executive -- can be pushed decisively to produce change. And again, that's obviously Obama's strategy. "Screaming bloody murder" at Obama will not only be regarded as irrelevant by anyone who does not already want to hyperventilate, it will lessen and not amplify the screamers' influence on actual events. Screaming at politicians may make the screamers feel better, but it will accomplish absolutely nothing. If you want to influence Obama, ignore him -- and persuade the kind of people who voted for him that he hasn't yet embraced the kind of change they voted for.

Claims of Obama's abandonment of his core beliefs are premature...

Today in his nationally syndicated column, E.J. Dionne claimed that Barack Obama is avoiding ideological differences and went on to claim that "ideological differences in the United States are rather small." Both of these claims are nonsense. Most Democrats in Congress as well as in the country have disagreed radically during the Bush years with most Republicans about the war in Iraq (Democrats believing that wars should not be used to rearrange other parts of the world politically); climate change (it's real, and not, as many Republicans insist, a myth); regulation of markets (on which Democrats have lately been proved right); and civil liberties (if they're sacrificed for security, we will cease to be the nation we thought we were). These are matters of profound ideological difference, and Democrats' beliefs imply one common belief: In a democracy, the instrument of the people's will is government, and it should be used to prevent the theft of our prosperity in the name of prosperity, and of our liberties in the name of liberty. There is no doubt that on all these fundamental questions, Barack Obama is an unambiguous Democrat. He is not and has never been a Republican, overt or covert. It remains to be seen if his decision to rise above emphasizing partisan differences at the time of his inauguration indicates that he is trying to rise above what have been his clear ideological beliefs. But we don't know that yet, and we have no evidence in his record or his life to suggest that he is only ephemerally attached to his ideas and beliefs. (Obama's recent disparaging of "ideology" is a clear reference to the kind of rigid ideology espoused by so many who served in the Bush Administration. The way he uses the word doesn't imply that he doesn't have core beliefs or ideas.) No one can read his account of how he felt about protecting the children of the projects on the South Side of Chicago, whose parents he successfully organized in order to force the city to free their buildings of asbestos, and really believe that he is a detached political calculator who does not feel deeply about the people who he is now going to lead as president. That kind of feeling is what makes a Democrat a Democrat. We're a long way yet from having to "go postal" about Barack Obama, as one prominent Democratic blogger -- digby on Hullabaloo -- suggests might be imminent, unless he stops showing so much solicitude for the views of Republicans. As his soaring approval rating shows, it is politically astute beyond the skill of any recent new president for him to be willing to listen to his opponents' views before undertaking action on many fronts that is sure to upset them.

The Kaine mutiny (of Virginia moderates)...

Based on a comment on the blog, The Field, 1/8/09:

Barack Obama has appointed Virginia Governor Tim Kaine to be the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. This wouldn't have happened if former Virginia governor Mark Warner and then Governor Kaine hadn't turned the state from red to blue in recent years (preparing the way for Obama's capturing its electoral votes in '08). This was one of those things that seemed impossible at the outset -- and then inevitable once it was done, given the sudden discovery of demographic change in northern Virginia. But social statistics don't turn themselves into votes, without a political strategy to win those votes.

The strategy was deceptively simple: the Democratic aspirant for governor would stipulate the importance of good social values and campaign doggedly in socially conservative areas of the state, embracing and getting happy with everyone who'd turn out for a rally. Southwest Virginians couldn't believe the amount of time that Warner and Kaine spent down there. Each of them won just enough of that formerly hard-right base to require the Republicans to hold every last northern Virginia moderate suburban taxpayer.

Then the Democratic candidate would campaign heatedly in northern Virginia, emphasizing his pragmatic invest-in-education and invest-in-roads programs. This was catnip to moderate Republican businesspeople and distressed soccer moms who saw the grip on the state capitol held by anti-tax, anti-anything conservatives, who'd let the suburbs' traffic dissolve into gridlock and insufficient school budgets create visible angst at the local level. It didn't hurt that Tim Kaine was married to the daughter of one of Virginia's most beloved Republican governors. Caricatured by the right as a smiling socialist-in-disguise (heard that one before?), Kaine sailed right by those tactics and pulverized the right with pragmatism.

Now if you know Tim Kaine, you know that he comes equipped with a passionate social justice commitment, deepened by his time working with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras (and if you want deep history about that, see the terrific movie, "The Mission", with Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro). So this improbable, cherubic-faced, balding, eyebrow-cocking nerdy guy who wants to remake the world followed in the footsteps of his telegenic precedessor Mark Warner, and completed the destruction of the time-tested electoral model for eternal control of Virginia by conservative Republicans. All that Barack Obama had to do in Virginia in '08 was paint by the same numbers.

The Virginia legislature still has a lot of John McCain types from Newport News, and Sarah Palin-loving types from down in Southside. But their comfy political tyranny in Virginia is history. No one should wonder why Barack Obama thinks a lot of Tim Kaine.

Blagojevich, Burris, the U.S. Senate, and Corruption

Those who believe that the U.S. Senate doesn't have the authority to refuse to seat Roland Burris, the former Illinois state official who was appointed to the seat by Gov. Rod Blagojevich, or who believe that it's embarrassing to refuse to seat a nice man who would be the only African-American Senator, are ignoring two crucial realities.

First, a seat in the United States Senate is not the property of any governor who has the authority to appoint a person to fill a vacancy, and any person so appointed has no "right" to occupy that seat on such authority. The seat belongs to the people. This is a political process, and as the Supreme Court has said on many occasions, the Congress needs to be given ample leverage as a body representing the people and as a separate branch of government to conduct its affairs, unless some egregious violation of rights is being committed.

Moreover, the Senate is entitled to act reasonably topreserve its integrity as an institution. The governor who made this appointment was only a few weeks ago arrested by the FBI because a federal prosecutor believed he had sufficient evidence to indict him for making such an appointment in exchange for campaign donations or other favors, and the timing of the arrest was dictated by the prosecutor's fear that the governor could imminently make a Senate appointment after having solicited such donations or favors. The Illinois political process has not had sufficient time to impeach the governor and remove him from office, but that is predicted to occur in a few weeks. Defiantly, the disgraced governor has gone ahead and made an appointment. It is impossible to know whether or not Blagojevich obtained any consideration from Burris for appointing him, but if the Illinois attorney general and secretary of state don't trust this appointment, why should the U.S. Senate? The Senate has every right to defend the integrity of its membership from any appointment made by this governor.

Second, no federal office should be occupied by someone appointed by an executive who is accused by a federal authority of extorting bribes from prospective occupants of the office. If our political leaders cannot prevent such an executive from using this kind of appointment for his own purposes, forget about discouraging corruption in our national political affairs. There is something much larger at stake here: the public's confidence in our democratic institutions. They will not believe that our politics is free from the suspicion or the fact of corruption unless and until it is.

Roland Burris is being used by Rod Blagojevich to enable him to cling to some appearance of political authority and effectiveness, in the face of impending impeachment. The Senate is not obligated to follow suit. This farce must end, without Blagojevich's appointee being accepted. If that is not the outcome, the public should assume that it will take much longer for our politics to undergo fundamental change.

Redefining the political narrative...

Comment on the blog Hullabaloo, 1/4/09

Unless President Obama or the activists, writers and political leaders who support him succeed in redefining the narrative of contemporary political history early in his presidency, any programmatic gains are likely to be short-lived. Bill Clinton's biggest failure as president was deliberately to avoid trying to refute Ronald Reagan's inaugural nostrum that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Clinton bragged about outdoing Republicans in trying to make government smaller while making it more effective. He seemed happy to flail about in the ideological strait-jacket with which Reagan had fitted all Democrats: Government was an evil to be minimized -- it was a kind of theft, of money earned by good people (mostly white) but taken by government and given to bad people (mostly not white). This was the toxic brew that helped Reagan -- famous for emblematically attacking one particular black "welfare mother" -- to attract working-class Democrats. Given the flaccid, exhausted state of the intellectual right now, and the freaky guns-and-oil, states-rights hollering of the Palin faction (the only part of the GOP now with any energy, albeit negative), the time is perfect for a new framing narrative.

That narrative has to restore the idea that the people themselves, on whose power the Constitution is based from its very first line ("We the People"), should demand that government actually do what the Constitution says it must do -- "promote the general welfare" -- and if that means reinventing the health care system, regulating polluters as harshly as they poison the environment, and punishing Wall Street titans who use public bail-out money for personal bonuses, then such policies shouldn't merely be defined as pragmatic given the present crisis, they should be explicitly and repeatedly justified as supported by the people in having elected a leader from the other party and also as normal, positive uses of public power. That Obama is trying to transcend partisan rancor actually helps the work of constructing this narrative, since no enduring historical narrative can survive the inevitable vicissitudes of elections every two years unless it transcends party fist-fights on the Sunday talk shows. Let Obama trumpet a new era of tolerance, unity, and a kind of domestic patriotism tied to regenerating our economy and reconstituting our society. The greatest presidents were those who used government vigorously to fight back crises and build national strength by what were considered unprecedented means (Lincoln was the first president to institute an income tax, albeit temporary, and the first to have the federal government invest in universities). National majorities don't rally around minimalism in the face of huge challenges, quite the opposite.

Don't underestimate Obama's ability to summon this kind of spirit and elicit a sense of enthusiasm for a new bow wave of reform. But it won't be sustainable unless there is a new narrative. That narrative should certainly explain why the country has been driven into a ditch, and the predicate of that is simple: If we elect presidents who spend almost 30 years abusing the idea of government, and they appoint incompetent or corrupt people to run the government, we will get wretched government. Yet this shouldn't be a narrative in narrow partisan terms, but rather a narrative that subsumes progressive goals in a new definition of what it means to love and work for our country and of what we should expect our government to do.