Oh! The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again
(Chorus)
And when they were up they were up
And when they were down they were down
And when they were only half way up
They were neither up nor down
Oh! The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
They banged their drums as they went up the hill
And they banged them down again
Oh! The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
They tootled their flutes as they marched up the hill
And they tootled them down again.
Well, the Emory University Faculty Council marched up the hill to a vote on revoking the provision in the university speech code under which students, faculty members, administrators, and departments can be sanctioned and the council marched itself down again by tabling the motion and seeking further advice. For more on the story, see: the Emory Wheel and Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass.
Subscribers to H-Scholar, a listserv for"independent scholars," learn all sorts of interesting things. Recently there's been a discussion of the cleaning of Michelangelo's David. No great surprise in the 500th year since his creation. It was surprising that a contributor to H-Scholar recalled when she last saw Michelangelo's masterpiece that"it was noticeably filthy, with a large cobweb dangling from his most private body part." What a poor representation of that mighty member, once so active and fruitful. See: II Samuel 3:2-5; and II Samuel 11-12.
Winnfield, Louisiana's"Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame" will induct a new class of honorees on 31 January. All previous honorees who are not either pushing up daisies or still serving time in the slammer promise to be there.
In deference to the sensitivities of parts of its electorate which have not experienced sufficient"biological change over time," Georgia's Superintendent of Public Education, Kathy Cox, has proposed banning the word the"buzzword""evolution" from public education in biology. Former President Jimmy Carter thinks the proposal makes the state look foolish in the eyes of the world and might point to the evidence over at Crooked Timber. A Republican and former public school teacher, Cox owes much of her election to the popularity of Secretary of State Cathy Cox, a Democrat. Meanwhile, despite all the questions being raised about its reliability, C. Cox continues to assert her faith in the Diebold e-voting equipment in which she invested the state's money and future political direction. Of course, Diebold did invest in her political future, which apparently includes a race for governor. Lord help us.
First came the news that Bush's core constituencies were the ones most in need of his marriage promotion proposals, which may held explain why he's in favor of it. Now, a new analysis shows that states which recieve more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes --"takers" in Daniel Pink's terminology -- were much more likely to have supported Bush in 2000.
Not only are the moralists immoral, but the anti-governmentarians are the greatest beneficiaries of government.
I'm all for redistributive government, where it's justified. But irony is only funny once. Then it becomes hypocrisy, and it isn't funny at all.
I remember when I joined it. I was going to bring light and logical change. (How is it that a historian can know so much of the past and forget so much of it in his daily life?) That was over four years ago.
I have discovered since that my concept of paradise is not always shared by others. To bend a Joni Mitchell lyric, many people believe that paradise is a parking lot. However, I have done some good (by my lights), and I have learned much about business, politics, and conflicting dreams.
Today is a fairly big day. We have been working on a master plan and are supposed to recommend a new draft of zoning and subdivisions ordinances to the City Council.
Much of the work is done by staff. Yep, in small cities (just over 8,000) as well as imperial capitals like D.C., one has to weigh carefully the expertise of staff members against their biases. It’s probably easier here, where the entire administrative staff can sit on one side of a not-too-long table.
I’m going to try to slip in something related to communications towers and bird kills. The odds are against me slipping something really substantive in; however, I have some hope of including language that requires applicants to build such towers to address the issue. That sort of thing actually can lead to change. Eventually. Occasionally.
I get tired of those words in this context: being “eventually” successful; “occasionally” on top. That’s part ego, part desire to help a community I’ve come to love continue to be a good place.
But Rice Lake started as a lumber town. The lake, as the name suggests, was originally more of a bog connected to the Red Cedar River. The lumber industry dammed the river and expanded the lake to its current size. And though nearly all that industry is long gone there’s still a veneer plant on the lakeshore, and there is still much of that old entrepreneurial attitude toward the woods and water and wetlands around us. They love nature, and they love to change it, to make it new, and human, and a good investment. And am I, really, all that different?
OK, when I wasn't looking, the Democratic Party did something smart: they switched to Proportional Allocation of primary convention delegates. So, all my thrashing and fulminating turns out to be misdirected (you'd think someone might have mentioned that before I got to my third post on the subject). I still think IRV would be good, particularly in the general election, and I also think that proportional allocation of electoral college votes (which my father suggested many years ago) would be great ideas. But the Democratic primaries will give convention delegates to any candidate who gets 15% or more of the state primary vote. No wonder William Safire is having visions of a really interesting Democratic convention. Robert Kuttner, whose article alerted me to the change also sees a brokered convention as a distinct possibility. I'm not sure: the candidates are still campaigning like it's"winner take all" and the reporters are still treating it that way. You'd think that Kerry got all the delegates from NH and is sitting pretty, and Dean got nothing but is plucky enough to keep going anyway, the way they're reporting it. It's like being on the wrong end of a psy-op campaign.....
Pick-a-Candidate Quiz update: Minnesota Public Radio has a candidate-matching quiz that corrects a few of the flaws of my earlier offering. This time you only get to choose policy options that have been offered by a candidate (which I see as a flaw:"Other" should be an option), which means that the choices are sometimes closely overlapping, but not comprehensive. Your final score is a real percentage, not normed to your closest match: this time my top score was in the 60s, though Kucinich still held the lead position. Al Sharpton still scored higher than you'd hope, tied with Kerry and Lieberman, but Dean actually was the second place finisher. This time, though, I had zero match with the Republican nominee.....
It occured to me, looking over the results, that an important control process would be to see how the candidates actually score against each other. If Wesley Clark were to take this test, would he really come out even with John Edwards? Would they be more likely to consider as VP someone who scored a close match? (They Should) OK, it's not deep theory, but it's starting to interest me.
In the aftermath of yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, I wonder what historical analogy will best explain the 2004 Democratic nominating process. My hunch now would be the 1988 race. John Edwards has played a role comparable to Al Gore’s in 1988—the moderate, telegenic, wonkish Southerner who everyone thinks should be running stronger in the polls. Howard Dean offers a combination of Bruce Babbitt, the good-government outsider, and the late Illinois senator Paul Simon, 1988’s version of representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” Al Sharpton lacks the breadth that Jesse Jackson did in 1988, but, like Jackson then, is running to highlight issues and mobilize the African-American base rather than from any hope of victory. Dick Gephardt, of course, was back as himself, and with an equally woeful result. There’s no 1988 parallel for Wesley Clark, but otherwise the overlap is considerable.
If 1988 is the appropriate historical analogy, then John Kerry would play the role of Mike Dukakis (under whom he served, briefly, as lieutenant governor during Dukakis’ second gubernatorial term). Much like Dukakis in 1988, Kerry in 2004 is acceptable to most wings of the party, even if he inspires little personal enthusiasm from any. Also like Dukakis, there are few specific positions with which Kerry is associated—indeed, from Iraq to taxes to affirmative action, Kerry has changed his position during the course of his career, much like Dukakis, who evolved from a good-government liberal to more of e technocrat. And Kerry, like Dukakis in 1988, has surged in large part from a vague sense that he would be the strongest candidate the party could offer.
Democrats discovered otherwise with Dukakis, and there’s good reason to think they will with Kerry as well, if he winds up the nominee. Indeed, it would be the ultimate irony were Kerry to get the nomination on the grounds of “electability,” since on paper he looks the ideal foe for a Republican: a patrician Massachusetts liberal with a reputation for altering his positions based on polls and with a surprisingly poor record in partisan elections (a loss in a 1972 House race and weak Senate race showings, for a Democrat in Massachusetts, in the only two elections—1984 and 1996—in which the state GOP contested the seat). One could imagine “electability” producing the nomination of Edwards, as a telegenic Southerner, Clark, with his national security expertise and his record of being right on the key—and difficult—international issues of the 1990s, or even Dean, with his credibility as an outsider. But Kerry? Like Dukakis in 1988, it’s hard to see electability as his strong suit.
The 1988 elections offered the original version of Super Tuesday (a mini-version had existed in 1984). The expectation was that a massive Southern primary would ensure a Southern nominee. Instead, the primaries produced an ambivalent result, with Dukakis winning in a few states and running strongly enough in the others to be perceived as the day’s overall winner. If, as it looks right now, the March 3 primaries produce a similar result for Kerry, then the 1988 analogy might indeed be worth pondering.
Bush maintains that despite the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Saddam Hussein posed"a grave and gathering threat to America and the world."
This allegation simply is not true, however much a monster Saddam may be.
Let's look at the issue Harpers style:
US population: 295 million
Iraq population: 24 million
US per capita annual income: $37,600
Iraq per capita annual income: 700
US nuclear warheads: 10,455
Iraq nuclear warheads: 0
US tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 31,496
Iraq tons of lethal chemical weapons (1997): 0
Number of foreign troops and civilians US military has killed since 1968: approx. 2 million
Number of foreign troops and civilians Iraqi military has killed since 1968: approx. 250,000
Over at Easily Distracted, Tim Burke has two posts up about e-technology and scholarship that are of interest to all of us. "I Also Froth" argues that the continued print form of most journals is a folly. On the other hand, "Burn the Catalog" argues that e-library catalogs are largely and increasingly inadequate.
As out-going president of the American Historical Association, Jim McPherson acknowledges complex issues facing our profession – the relation of fact and fiction, the role of the historical imagination, whether history is a construction or a reconstruction, the scandal of plagiarism and fraudulent sources -- in an interesting final column for Perspectives. He calls attention to Leonard F. Guttridge's and Ray A. Neff's new book, Dark Union: The Secret Web of Profiteers, Politicians, and Booth Conspirators That Led to Lincoln's Death (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). It apparently relies on documents or copies of documents which may never have existed to reweave conspiracy theories about Lincoln's assassination which were long ago debunked. Will Guttridge and Neff reply to the charges from a president of the AHA? Is this another instance of a commercial press failing to subject a manuscript to peer review? Will Wiley withdraw the book from publication, as it has Candles and Soap-Making for Dummies? If not, why not? Does freedom of the press require that we tolerate occasional fraud or research so uncritical that it verges on fraud? McPherson says that the book is fiction, but if his review of the facts is correct, as I believe it is, so long as Wiley continues to market the book as history it appears to be fraud.
Richard Shweder, an anthropologist at Chicago, has a thoughtful essay, "Tuskegee Re-examined", which does an excellent job of contextualizing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. There may be little here that revises James Jones excellent book, Bad Blood, but there is much that subverts popular rhetorical readings of the experiment.
I am second to none in admiration for Eugene Volokh, chief conspirator at The Volokh Conspiracy. He is simply so smart and teaches me so much that I allow for the libertarian bias and feast at his blog. Recently, his post on the release of a documentary about Ethel and Julius Rosenberg made what I thought was a sensible point that the western left ought by now be quite clear about the monstrosity of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the senior Volokh's post loosed the lesser dogs of war in a torrent of posts of lesser quality. See: Randy Barnett (here, here, here, here, here, and here), Sasha Volokh (here, here, and here), and Juan Non-Volokh (here). The urbane Conspiracy degenerated into the cheap form of liberal-bashing that we have come to expect from Ann Coulter and her ilk. Really, it's Coulter without the sexy look. They ignore the crucial difference between the regulative state and state ownership and elide the vast gulf between liberalism and Marxism to hold the former responsible for the latter. I expect better than that from the Conspirators!
Update: See also Brad DeLong's challenge to a Non-Volokh and the extended discussion at his site.
Finally, do read Quentin Hardy's"Hitting Slavery Where It Hurts" in the current issue of Forbes. At the risk of rewarding slave traders, market strategies seem to be more effective in freeing large numbers of people. Legal strategies, however, are slower and simply do not work in places like the Sudan, where there are no legal structures to work within to abolish slavery. Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education for the tip.
Update: Do also read Peter Landesman's "The Girls Next Door", if you are prepared for the graphic details, and Tim Burke's reflections on "Evil". It apparently thrives among us. Warning: Jack Shafer at Slate is skeptical of Landesman's journalism.
My impression is that historians tend to shy away from re-enactment for lots of good reasons, personal reticence, doubts about its capacity to re-enact authentically, and qualms about re-enactment's most popular forms, including Civil War engagements. Some Confederates are best kept in the attic.
But on Friday and Saturday, 6-7 February 2004, fifteen prominent historians will gather at Oberlin, Ohio, to re-enact"The Lane Debates: The Making of Radical Abolition and the Oberlin
Commitment to Racial Egalitarianism." In full costume, they will re-enact the historic debates over slavery, colonization, immediatism, and black rights that took place at Cincinnati's Lane Seminary in February 1834 and at Oberlin College in February 1835. The participants include Robert Abzug, Hugh Davis, Nancy S. Dye, Douglas Egerton, Robert Forbes, Robert Hall, Scott Hancock, Peter Hinks, Gary Kornblith, Carol Lasser, Richard Newman, John Quist, John
Stauffer, and James Brewer Stewart.
The event is free and open to the public. It will be held at historic First Church (Charles Grandison Finney's church) in Oberlin on Friday, 9-5, and Saturday, 9-3. For more information, go here and click on The Lane Debates. Everyone is invited to attend. Thanks to Gary Kornblith and H-Slavery for the notice.
In a surprise development, Emory University faculty members may vote on 28 January on a motion to revoke a portion of the university's speech code which authorizes sanctions against individuals or departments for offensive speech. The university's code has faced student and faculty challenges to it in the past, but the current motion grows out of sanctions against the anthropology department and anthropology professor Carol Worthman for her reference to fellow biological anthropologists as"niggers in a woodpile." For more on the story, see: the Emory Wheel and Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass.
In an attempt to make the qualification more vocational, candidates will be able to junk the actual history and instead study the role of museums and galleries, traditional handicrafts, and the role of the media in popularising history. Among the more gruelling tasks students could be required to undertake would be, for example,"to design a brochure presenting a historical site to the public; devise an advertising campaign for a commemoration of a local event, or write about the management of a heritage site."Oh what a good idea. Or they could just go to the movies and study how Mel Gibson looks in a kilt or Nicole Kidman in a prostehtic nose. The possibilities are endless.
Will teenagers have the sophistication to analyse the implicit agenda of a television programme? When they design a brochure for a historical site, will they have any idea of the multiple histories it contains? Without these fundamentals, the introduction of a vocational element at the expense of academic approaches a nefarious robbery of knowledge.It's the old conflict between education as an instrumental good and education as an intrinsic good. It's depressing how automatically the first is taken to trump the second - how often the second isn't even taken into account.
As a result of Watergate, Congress seized Nixon’s presidential papers, and they currently are housed in the National Archives, making Nixon the only President since Herbert Hoover not to have his papers housed at a presidential library. So it may seem only fair that the papers are now going to be transferred.
The Nixon Library in California, however, fails in even the most basic test of historical objectivity. Scholars planning a Nixon study therefore would be well advised to head off to Washington this year, before the transfer of papers begins in 2005.
Garelick laments, “Although virtually all of my female students expect to pursue careers, this is where their enlightenment seems to end. For them, the reassuring power of a college degree to unlock professional doors seems to have rendered ‘feminism’ obsolete. In other words, the fires of feminism may have burned down to the ashes of careerism.”
To revive these fires, Garelick says that she has looked “to introduce contemporary politics into classroom discussions.” Alas, such efforts “meet with blank stares. Even this past year, as our country began a war, I encountered mostly silence when I broached the topic of Iraq, a mix of paralysis and anxiety, plus some disgruntlement over my deviating from the syllabus.”
Rather than consider that, perhaps, students whose parents are paying $37,900 annually for them to attend Connecticut College enroll in classes at the school to learn academic subjects rather than to have professors lead discussions of contemporary politics, Garelick admits that, “each year, frankly, I feel increasingly compelled to look beyond my syllabuses and to devote myself more to teaching ‘wakeful’ political literacy.” She goes on to criticize the Bush administration’s policies toward overtime pay and the war in Iraq, and to laud Howard Dean’s reliance on the internet in his campaign—all perfectly reasonable political positions. But unclear is either their connection to French and Italian or Garelick’s professional training to “teach” on such issues. And, of course, every minute spent in class on “wakeful political literacy” is one minute less spent on the academic subjects Garelick’s course is supposed to cover.
At least, to her credit, Garelick doesn’t hide her teaching goals.
My comment about the"pick-a-candidate" quiz ended with some thoughts on what I called"ranked preference" voting and the possibility of doing a national party primary poll instead of a dribble of early state votes. Anne Zook thought I was being silly, at least in my reliance on Internet technology. (Also check out the comments, in which we exchange some extended ranting about non-participants and I compare gerrymandering to treason. I am starting to get a little nervous about the percieved legitimacy of a system in which a minority of the population elects representatives who seem to work in the interests of their supportive constituents without a lot of attention to larger pictures. More on that some other time.)
She's right, in a sense: we haven't developed an on-line voting system that is as secure and reliable as our current paper ballot systems. I think that's because we haven't been trying very hard. When the stakes are high enough, it can be done: we send personal financial information over the Internet all the time, but most identity theft still relies on stealing data from merchants, public sources (how many colleges still use social security numbers for student identification?), or reconstructed physical evidence (receipts, etc.). But a national primary could be conducted in a number of other pretty secure ways. Mail-in ballots, for example, wouldn't be any less reliable than our current absentee ballots, and that system could certainly be tightened up with small changes. They are getting more popular, anyway, and have been shown to increase levels of participation (and Anne approves of them, too). Properly designed closed-circuit computer systems -- stand-alone networks without internet connections, like the networks which operate ATMs -- couldn't be hacked from the outside: terminals could be set up in voting districts, just like the primaries now. That's a couple of ideas.
But the method of voting is not as interesting to me, except as a technical issue, as the system of voting. The current dribble of early states is a classic case of evolution beyond function: there's no reason for 80+% of the voters to be excluded from the process because it's become a habit. If the technical aspects can be worked out, why don't we run a single national primary? We can make both primary day and election day holidays (someone recently suggested that we shift Veteran's Day to election day, which I like; we can use Memorial Day or Presidents' Day for primaries, depending on how long we want the general election to last.) and have some real fun.
If running a national poll with a single deadline seems too precipitous, there was a proposal floated four years ago to carry out"stacked" primaries, a kind of organized"Super Tuesdays" system. The states would be divided into groups (equal numbers in each group; I think ten was the original proposal), by size. The primaries would happen at one-week or two-week intervals in order of ascending size: the smallest states would vote one week (this preserves the value of voting in small states), followed by the next tier of states, ending up with a couple of weeks in which the bulk of delegates would be chosen. This has the virtue of being a relatively short process, compared to our current primaries, but one which distributes attention much more equitably."Momentum" would still be a factor, but it might actually mean something....
But my deep-rooted qualms about our electoral system have more to do with the actual voting process. One of the things I like about the Iowa caucus process is that it doesn't result in a winner-take-all delegate allocation for achieving a slight plurality. I'd be happy with either of two changes -- proportional allocation or Instant-Runoff Voting -- but both would be even better.
Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), it turns out, is what I was calling ranked preference voting: voters choose multiple candidates, ranked first, second, etc. If there is no majority candidate, the candidate who recieved the lowest vote total would have their votes rescinded and those voters' votes would go to their respective second choices. This continues until there is a majority winner. As the current Z Magazine points out [by subscription only, but check out the Center for Voting and Democracy for lots more by the same authors] this will both strengthen alternative parties as well as reducing the"spoiler" effect of candidates like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. Attack politics will be less attractive (if you can't be their first choice, you don't want to be the guy who called their first choice bad names) and coalition politics will rise quickly. If people don't have a second choice, they can just put a first choice. A little confusing? At first, perhaps, but people will get used to it pretty quickly, and just imagine what political scientists and pollsters will do with this data! At least it would reduce the kind of 'process' reportage that has turned our political process into a bad circus (not even a good circus, with clowns and trained animals; more like a bad county carnival with a few drunk jugglers.).
And let's just ditch the winner-take-all system of state votes, and give the top vote-getters (say, everyone over 10%) a proportional allocation of delegates: CVD calls this"Full Representation" or"Proportional Representation" (PR). So a candidate who was a strong regional candidate would still have to present good campaigns elsewhere because they would still be getting only a share of their states' candidates. On the other hand, they wouldn't be getting shut out of other states, either. It would slow down the selection process, and would also reduce the tendency towards attack campaigns (even if a candidate drops out, they still have delegates to broker). PR could also produce more parties: I foresee candidates appealing to different wings of their respective parties deciding to forego brokering deals and forming new parties.
Iowa already has PR, and a form of IRV because non-viable candidates' supporters get to pick a viable caucus to join. It can work (actually, it's fun, but I'm geeky). Before you say things like"well, it sure didn't reduce the attack campaigning in Iowa" remember that Iowa was just the first stop in a short string of winner-take-all winnowing exercises that may or may not last long enough for a majority of delegates to be chosen.
And all ballots should have"none of the above" as an option, and if"none of the above" wins they should hold the election over again, with different candidates. Seriously.
Garelick laments, “Although virtually all of my female students expect to pursue careers, this is where their enlightenment seems to end. For them, the reassuring power of a college degree to unlock professional doors seems to have rendered ‘feminism’ obsolete. In other words, the fires of feminism may have burned down to the ashes of careerism.”
To revive these fires, Garelick says that she has looked “to introduce contemporary politics into classroom discussions.” Alas, such efforts “meet with blank stares. Even this past year, as our country began a war, I encountered mostly silence when I broached the topic of Iraq, a mix of paralysis and anxiety, plus some disgruntlement over my deviating from the syllabus.” Rather than consider that, perhaps, students whose parents are paying $37,900 annually for them to attend Connecticut College enroll in classes at the school to learn academic subjects rather than to have professors lead discussions of contemporary politics, Garelick admits that, “each year, frankly, I feel increasingly compelled to look beyond my syllabuses and to devote myself more to teaching ‘wakeful’ political literacy.” She goes on to criticize the Bush administration’s policies toward overtime pay and the war in Iraq, and to laud Howard Dean’s reliance on the internet in his campaign—all perfectly reasonable political positions. But unclear is either their connection to French and Italian or Garelick’s professional training to “teach” on such issues. And, of course, every minute spent in class on “wakeful political literacy” is one minute less spent on the academic subjects Garelick’s course is supposed to cover.
At least, to her credit, Garelick doesn’t hide her teaching goals.
My comment about the"pick-a-candidate" quiz ended with some thoughts on what I called"ranked preference" voting and the possibility of doing a national party primary poll instead of a dribble of early state votes. Anne Zook thought I was being silly, at least in my reliance on Internet technology. (She also has some eloquent ranting about non-participants in the comments section, with which I fully agree: I am starting to get a little nervous about the percieved legitimacy of a system in which a minority of the population elects representatives who seem to work in the interests of their supportive constituents without a lot of attention to larger pictures.)
She's right, in a sense: we haven't developed an on-line voting system that is as secure and reliable as our current paper ballot systems. I think that's because we haven't been trying very hard. When the stakes are high enough, it can be done: we send personal financial information over the Internet all the time, but most identity theft still relies on stealing data from merchants, public sources (how many colleges still use social security numbers for student identification?), or reconstructed physical evidence (receipts, etc.). But a national primary could be conducted in a number of other pretty secure ways. Mail-in ballots, for example, wouldn't be any less reliable than our current absentee ballots, and that system could certainly be tightened up with small changes. They are getting more popular, anyway, and have been shown to increase levels of participation (and Anne approves of them, too). Properly designed closed-circuit computer systems -- stand-alone networks without internet connections, like the networks which operate ATMs -- couldn't be hacked from the outside: terminals could be set up in voting districts, just like the primaries now. That's a couple of ideas.
But the method of voting is not as interesting to me, except as a technical issue, as the system of voting. The current dribble of early states is a classic case of evolution beyond function: there's no reason for 80+% of the voters to be excluded from the process because it's become a habit. If the technical aspects can be worked out, why don't we run a single national primary? We can make both primary day and election day holidays (someone recently suggested that we shift Veteran's Day to election day, which I like; we can use Memorial Day or Presidents' Day for primaries, depending on how long we want the general election to last.) and have some real fun.
If running a national poll with a single deadline seems too precipitous, there was a proposal floated four years ago to carry out"stacked" primaries, a kind of organized"Super Tuesdays" system. The states would be divided into groups (equal numbers in each group; I think ten was the original proposal), by size. The primaries would happen at one-week or two-week intervals in order of ascending size: the smallest states would vote one week (this preserves the value of voting in small states), followed by the next tier of states, ending up with a couple of weeks in which the bulk of delegates would be chosen. This has the virtue of being a relatively short process, compared to our current primaries, but one which distributes attention much more equitably."Momentum" would still be a factor, but it might actually mean something....
But my deep-rooted qualms about our electoral system have more to do with the actual voting process. One of the things I like about the Iowa caucus process is that it doesn't result in a winner-take-all delegate allocation for achieving a slight plurality. I'd be happy with either of two changes -- proportional allocation or Instant-Runoff Voting -- but both would be even better.
Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), it turns out, is what I was calling ranked preference voting: voters choose multiple candidates, ranked first, second, etc. If there is no majority candidate, the candidate who recieved the lowest vote total would have their votes rescinded and those voters' votes would go to their respective second choices. This continues until there is a majority winner. As the current Z Magazine points out [by subscription only, but check out the CVD site for more by the same authors] this will both strengthen alternative parties as well as reducing the"spoiler" effect of candidates like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. Attack politics will be less attractive (if you can't be their first choice, you don't want to be the guy who called their first choice bad names) and coalition politics will rise quickly. If people don't have a second choice, they can just put a first choice. A little confusing? At first, perhaps, but people will get used to it pretty quickly, and just imagine what political scientists and pollsters will do with this data! (More information on IRV than you ever dreamed of is at The Center for Voting and Democracy, including tallies of current state and national figures elected by pluralities, and a withering analysis of districting and uncontested elections.)
And let's just ditch the winner-take-all system of state votes, and give the top vote-getters (say, everyone over 10%) a proportional allocation of delegates: CVD calls this"Full Representation" or"Proportional Representation" (PR). So a candidate who was a strong regional candidate would still have to present good campaigns elsewhere because they would still be getting only a share of their states' candidates. On the other hand, they wouldn't be getting shut out of other states, either. It would slow down the selection process, and would also reduce the tendency towards attack campaigns (even if a candidate drops out, they still have delegates to broker). PR could also produce more parties: I foresee candidates appealing to different wings of their respective parties deciding to forego brokering deals and forming new parties.
Iowa already has PR, and a form of IRV because non-viable candidates' supporters get to pick a viable caucus to join. It can work (actually, it's fun, but I'm geeky). Before you say things like"well, it sure didn't reduce the attack campaigning in Iowa" remember that Iowa was just the first stop in a short string of winner-take-all winnowing exercises that may or may not last long enough for a majority of delegates to be chosen.
And all ballots should have"none of the above" as an option, and if"none of the above" wins they should hold the election over again, with different candidates. Seriously.
Garelick laments, “Although virtually all of my female students expect to pursue careers, this is where their enlightenment seems to end. For them, the reassuring power of a college degree to unlock professional doors seems to have rendered ‘feminism’ obsolete. In other words, the fires of feminism may have burned down to the ashes of careerism.”
To revive these fires, Garelick says that she has looked “to introduce contemporary politics into classroom discussions.” Alas, such efforts “meet with blank stares. Even this past year, as our country began a war, I encountered mostly silence when I broached the topic of Iraq, a mix of paralysis and anxiety, plus some disgruntlement over my deviating from the syllabus.” Rather than consider that, perhaps, students whose parents are paying $37,900 annually for them to attend Connecticut College enroll in classes at the school to learn academic subjects rather than to have professors lead discussions of contemporary politics, Garelick admits that, “each year, frankly, I feel increasingly compelled to look beyond my syllabuses and to devote myself more to teaching ‘wakeful’ political literacy.” She goes on to criticize the Bush administration’s policies toward overtime pay and the war in Iraq, and to laud Howard Dean’s reliance on the internet in his campaign—all perfectly reasonable political positions. But unclear is either their connection to French and Italian or Garelick’s professional training to “teach” on such issues. And, of course, every minute spent in class on “wakeful political literacy” is one minute less spent on the academic subjects Garelick’s course is supposed to cover.
At least, to her credit, Garelick doesn’t hide her teaching goals.
Garelick laments, “Although virtually all of my female students expect to pursue careers, this is where their enlightenment seems to end. For them, the reassuring power of a college degree to unlock professional doors seems to have rendered ‘feminism’ obsolete. In other words, the fires of feminism may have burned down to the ashes of careerism.”
To revive these fires, Garelick says that she has looked “to introduce contemporary politics into classroom discussions.” Alas, such efforts “meet with blank stares. Even this past year, as our country began a war, I encountered mostly silence when I broached the topic of Iraq, a mix of paralysis and anxiety, plus some disgruntlement over my deviating from the syllabus.” Rather than consider that, perhaps, students whose parents are paying $37,900 annually for them to attend Connecticut College enroll in classes at the school to learn academic subjects rather than to have professors lead discussions of contemporary politics, Garelick admits that, “each year, frankly, I feel increasingly compelled to look beyond my syllabuses and to devote myself more to teaching ‘wakeful’ political literacy.” She goes on to criticize the Bush administration’s policies toward overtime pay and the war in Iraq, and to laud Howard Dean’s reliance on the internet in his campaign—all perfectly reasonable political positions. But unclear is either their connection to French and Italian or Garelick’s professional training to “teach” on such issues. And, of course, every minute spent in class on “wakeful political literacy” is one minute less spent on the academic subjects Garelick’s course is supposed to cover.
At least, to her credit, Garelick doesn’t hide her teaching goals.
After I posted my comment about the"pick-a-candidate" quiz, ending with some thoughts on what I called"ranked preference" voting and the possibility of doing a national party primary poll instead of a dribble of early state votes. Anne Zook thought I was being silly, at least in my reliance on Internet technology. She also has some eloquent ranting about non-participants in the comments section, with which I fully agree.
She's right, in a sense: we haven't developed an on-line voting system that is as secure and reliable as our current paper ballot systems. I think that's because we haven't been trying very hard. When the stakes are high enough, it can be done: we send personal financial information over the Internet all the time, but most identity theft still relies on stealing data from merchants, public sources (how many colleges still use social security numbers for student identification?), or reconstructed physical evidence (receipts, etc.). But a national primary could be conducted in a number of other pretty secure ways. Absentee ballots, for example, wouldn't be any less reliable than our current absentee ballots, and that system could certainly be tightened up with small changes. They are getting more popular, anyway, and have been shown to increase levels of participation. Properly designed closed-circuit computer systems -- stand-alone networks without internet connections, like the networks which operate ATMs -- couldn't be hacked from the outside: terminals could be set up in voting districts, just like the primaries now. That's a couple of ideas.
But the method of voting is not as interesting to me, except as a technical issue, as the system of voting. The current dribble of early states is a classic case of evolution beyond function: there's no reason for 80+% of the voters to be excluded from the process because it's become a habit. If the technical aspects can be worked out, why don't we run a single national primary? We can make both primary day and election day a holiday (someone recently suggested that we shift Veteran's Day to election day, which I like; we can use Memorial Day or President's Day for primaries, depending on how long we want the general election to last.) and have some real fun.
If running a national poll with a single deadline seems too precipitous, there was a proposal floated four years ago to carry out"stacked" primaries. The states would be divided into groups (equal numbers in each group; I think ten was the original proposal), by size. The primaries would happen at one-week or two-week intervals in order of ascending size: the smallest states would vote one week (this preserves the value of voting in small states), followed by the next tier of states, ending up with a couple of weeks in which the bulk of delegates would be chosen. This has the virtue of being a relatively short process, compared to our current primaries, but one which distributes attention much more equitably."Momentum" would still be a factor, but it might actually mean something....
But my deep-rooted qualms about our electoral system have more to do with the actual voting process. One of the things I like about the Iowa caucus process is that it doesn't result in a winner-take-all delegate allocation for achieving a slight plurality. I'd be happy with either of two changes: proportional allocation or Instant-Runoff Voting.
Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), it turns out, is what vote reform advocates and political scientists call my ranked preference voting: the system by which voters can choose multiple candidates, ranked first, second, etc. If there is no majority candidate, the candidate who recieved the lowest vote total would have their votes rescinded and those voters' votes would go to their respective second choices. This continues until there is a majority winner. As the current Z Magazine points out [by subscription only] this will both strengthen alternative parties as well as reducing the"spoiler" effect of candidates like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader. Attack politics will be less attractive (if you can't be their first choice, you don't want to be the guy who called their first choice bad names) and coalition politics will rise quickly. If people don't have a second choice, they can just put a first choice. A little confusing? At first, perhaps, but people can get used to it pretty quickly: how many passwords and security codes do you already have in your head? More information on IRV than you ever dreamed of is at The Center for Voting and Democracy.
If that's too much, then let's just ditch the winner-take-all system of state votes, and give the top vote-getters (say, everyone over 10%) a proportional allocation of delegates: CVD calls this"Full Representation" or"Proportional Representation" (FR/PR). So a candidate who was a strong regional candidate would still have to present good campaigns elsewhere because they would still be getting only a share of their states' candidates. On the other hand, they wouldn't be getting shut out of other states, either. It would slow down the selection process, and would also reduce the tendency towards attack campaigns (even if a candidate drops out, they still have delegates to broker). FR/PR could also produce more parties: I foresee candidates appealing to different wings of their respective parties deciding to forego brokering deals and forming new parties. But unless we institute some form of IRV at the national level.
Iowa already has FR/PR, and a form of IRV because non-viable candidates' supporters get to pick a viable caucus to join. It can work. And all ballots should have"none of the above" as an option, and if"none of the above" wins they should hold the election over again, with different candidates. Seriously.
I generally think it's a bad sign when scholars have to fall back onto the"back off, man, I'm a scholar" tactic. It's usually a sign of a weak underlying case producing bluster. There are times where it's justified, where an obscurantist or mindless polemicist is howling to the moon about some issue that he or she literally knows nothing about. But even then, you have to deliver the goods, and say what it is that you know that someone else doesn't.
In this case, I think it's a really bad sign that Alterman actually writes, in his own words,"Since he is not trained as a historian, Morris lacks the ability to weigh the value of one conversation against another, considering context, hidden motives and persons present". For one, the notion that this is a particular or peculiar methodological skill of historians strikes me as a bit odd. For another, it suggests that Alterman has never seen any of Errol Morris' films besides"The Fog of War", despite his profession of admiration for Morris' work. If there's anything that Morris seems good at, it's weighing the value of conversations against one another, and uncovering contexts, motives and situations that condition particular conversations.
More to the point, it seems to me that in their exchange in the Nation is actually a pretty good example of meat-and-potatoes history, and were Morris a historian publishing in historical journals, he would be at least making a permissible argument. If you read carefully the specifics that are at stake here, Morris first off is making an incredibly tightly focused chronological argument about late 1963 and early 1964 about a very narrow window of contingency in which he believes Robert McNamara was advising Johnson to consider withdrawing from Vietnam. Alterman responds with a quote from May 1964 suggesting a contrary possibility. At the least, since Morris so carefully circumscribes the temporal period of his claims, they're actually rather carefully"historical" in the scholarly sense. He doesn't deserve to be rebuked as a good filmmaker, bad historian. It may be that there's a reasonable argument to be had about evidence either way, but that's what good historians do.
More to the point, when Alterman quotes McNamara and Johnson, I come away convinced that both of them were saying more or less the same thing: that the war was a unwinnable dog and they can't get out. Alterman quotes McNamara at the end of his point #3 and Johnson at the beginning of #3 and seems to think that they're saying something completely different. To me, it seems like pretty much the same thing.
There's a more general problem here with the whole damn discussion, and that's the bizarre fetish that most of the people who care about pinning fault for Vietnam on some particular villain have about carrying the day for their man, and the religious mania they have for resolving all contradictions in the record. What I come away convinced of from this discussion and everything else I've ever read about it is that Johnson, McNamara, Bundy, Kennedy and everyone else who had a say about it believed and said contradictory things depending on the time of day, the context, the mood, and the people in the room. Exactly what Alterman says historians are supposed to consider. Why he wants to smooth out those contradictions so that one admitted"pathological liar" and not the other ends up with the lion's share of personal responsibility for a complicatedly collective, institutional and social failure is not clear to me. I haven't yet seen"The Fog of War", but I have a hard time believing that Morris, who normally wallows in contradiction and ambiguity, is as eager to deal out absolution and punishment in such easy measure. Maybe it's because Alterman needs to preserve the Johnson of the Great Society and civil rights agains the Johnson of Vietnam, the same way that the somewhat pathetic rear-guard devotees of John Kennedy's sacred flame need to believe that had he lived, all the bad events of the 1960s would never have happened.
Me, I can live with a world where McNamara and Johnson and all their advisors said different things at different moments, and believed different things at different moments--maybe three contradictory things at the same time. I guess I don't have a dog in this fight.
Over at Easily Distracted, Tim Burke has two posts up about e-technology and scholarship that are of interest to all of us. "I Also Froth" argues that the continued print form of most journals is a folly. On the other hand, "Burn the Catalog" argues that e-library catalogs are largely and increasingly inadequate.
As out-going president of the American Historical Association, Jim McPherson addresses complex issues facing our profession – the relation of fact and fiction, the role of the historical imagination, whether history is a construction or a reconstruction, the scandal of fraudulent sources -- in a fascinating final column for Perspectives. He calls attention to Leonard F. Guttridge and Ray A. Neff's new book, Dark Union: The Secret Web of Profiteers, Politicians, and Booth Conspirators That Led to Lincoln's Death (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). It apparently relies on documents or copies of documents which may never have existed to reweave conspiracy theories about Lincoln's assassination which have been debunked long ago. Will Guttridge and Neff reply to the charges from a president of the AHA? Will Wiley withdraw the book from publication? If not, why not? Does freedom of the press require that we tolerate occasional fraud or research so unself-critical that it verges on fraud? The book is fiction, McPherson suggests, but so long as Wiley markets it as history it is fraud.
Finally, do read Quentin Hardy's"Hitting Slavery Where It Hurts" in the current issue of Forbes. Market strategies seem to be more effective in freeing large numbers of people, but they risk rewarding slave traders. Legal strategies, however, are slower and simply do not work in places like the Sudan, where there are no legal structures to work within to abolish slavery.
