Easily Distracted

That government regulation makes as well as hurts businesses is not news to economists and political scientists. Nor is it to politicians, whatever their declared ideology, however dumb they pretend to be in public. Is it news to the American public, at least to the public that seeks smaller government and complains about regulation and interference?

Yes and no. Part of the basic problem we’re all facing in the near-term future is that most of us, across the political spectrum, emotionally and politically classify government action differently based on a sort of dog’s breakfast of ideas, assumptions and intuitions. Consider some of the following:

The New York Times Magazine recently ran a story on the battle over fire retardant chemicals in furniture and clothing that recounted a history of divergent consumer crusades, competing teams of experts and industries with incommensurable relationships to past, present and future regulations. The more recently mobilized crusaders have been able to enlist the support of predictably simple-minded figures like Nicolas Kristof to move the regulatory momentum in their direction, which will probably also shift both the funding and marketability of related work by experts. Peel it back a layer, though, and the same sort of lightly neurotic middle-class consumers who tweet and Facebook furiously away every time the New York Times gives them another thing to worry about are only the successors to earlier generations of parental or domestic consumers who often demanded the very regulations that recent advocates condemn so furiously. When I was young, imaginations were haunted was stories of children whose pajamas or Halloween costumes burst into spectacular infernos at the mere thought of a candle; now we’re told to fear that cancer is seeping into our couch potato pores from a cushion full of chemicals.

It’s not that either scenario is pure fiction: the peer-reviewed science behind both concerns often traces back to perfectly sincere efforts by researchers that is as good–or bad–as the experimental design and instrumentation of any given moment allows. Nor, as the fevered imagination of the dafter kind of libertarianism might suggest, is there some diabolical regulator waiting for a chance to spring upon the free market and wrap it in the chains of socialist drudgery. Regulation creates entrepreneurial opportunities, and that’s part of where the problem comes in. Dictate that some consumer goods should retard fires, and you instantly bring a whole new business to life. Provided that the products that are being regulated have a strong built-in demand, it might be a win-win opportunity: nobody’s going to stop buying couches or pajamas if they cost a bit more due to new chemicals. If the new regulated product is manifestly less desirable, pleasurable or useful, that’s another matter altogether, but even that’s an opportunity for the entreprenurial beneficiary of the regulation: who will be the first to make couches with chemicals comfortable, or food without a restricted additive tasty or pretty again?

The idea that regulation abstractly harms or restricts business is a shibboleth. Regulations that can’t be met, regulations that are enforced capriciously or unevenly, regulations that make the problem they set out to address worse: those are real issues. But these are not problems that arise abstractly or generically from the concept of regulation itself.

The problem is that the flip approach, from technocrats, is no more comforting. The typical policy-wonk technocrat shaves his utilitarianism into smaller and smaller wisps of dust, always assuming that sober officials, sensible experts and good science in the absence of crass politics and corrupt money will let us calibrate our scales to a sufficiently fine point that we can always know whether it’s better to have three more ignited Underoos or twenty more cancer cases than we would have otherwise. This is one of the wellsprings of populist irritation with the generalized concept of regulation: a suspicion that spectacular narratives of risk, often emotionally powerful to some vocal crusader due to their personal experience, are being directed to the maintenance of elaborate networks of regulation that work with small effect sizes and diminishing returns. The narrative intensity of the crusades and the political economy of expert research are ill-matched in affect and habitus, but each depends upon the other. Even the current Republican Party, marshaled against “smart, elite people” and “fact-checking”, can’t really detach entirely from the proposition that some expertise, somewhere, licenses its arguments against specific policy and regulation. They might be the worst case, but everyone has their own precious everyday world that they will seek to reproduce even when the scales of expertise seem to tilt against them. For example, whatever the flaws of the much-discussed Stanford study on organic food, it seems entirely possible to me that much of what is believed about such food by its consumers would be reinvented and resurrected in the face of almost any finding that diminished those beliefs–and I say that as someone who will often buy food with some version of those beliefs lurking within my preferences.

In cases where effect sizes are small, where the authority of science is easily captured by both funding and narrative, where the choices before us drearily compact into dark and Grinchly caves of icy utilitarianism, maybe we could all just relax about “regulation”, and understand that however the calculations and policies get made, somebody’s going to make some money and none of us will be altogether that different when we go to bed that night. Where it really matters for larger publics is a choice that might be described as concerning regulation is in fact nothing so ordinary or trivial. Say, for example, in this NYT story on high-frequency trading. Here the difference between one regime and another is economically momentous–but more importantly, the basic issue is not some small calculus of greatest good for greatest number, but fundamental questions of trust, investment in the long-term, and justice. Whether couches are more comfortable and (possibly) slightly more flammable or whether the complex etiology of cancer gets a slight shift at the cost of killing a line of business is one thing. Whether a small group of algorithmically-equipped parasites kill their host outright while putting the entire global economy at profound risk is another. If we could give up dumb talk about regulation or “the size of government”, we might have a chance to more clearly discern when we’re in more serious terrain that publics must forcefully engage and leave some of the rest to the background sussurus of businesses, officials and consumers rubbing up against one another.

Corey Robin thinks so , and explains liberal disdain towards the Chicago strike as a spill-over of elite belief that teachers are socioeconomic losers doing a job that anyone could do.

I think he’s on to something, though in many ways I think it’s better as a general sociology and social history of sentiment towards teachers and education and a little dodgier as a rejoinder to specific critics. I also think there is maybe a little more complexity and contradiction in the attitude towards teachers, though, even in elite communities.

Like Corey Robin, I went to public schools in upper middle-class communities, had great relationships with most of my teachers, felt enormous affection for the education I received, and so on. On the other hand, I don’t have good feelings about the totality of “school”, particularly before high school, because (like more than a few academics) I also recall being bullied with great frequency, in no small measure because I did like school and education and a vocal and aggressive subset of other students did not.

So something is going on even while we’re being schooled that draws from both parents and the wider culture, but I also think has its own dynamic among students. Teachers, mostly unfairly, often become a holder for all of that wider, more diffuse antagonism towards the experience of education. And we should not be too quick to write that antagonism off as a conservative or elite disdain: there’s a long, sound history of progressive critiques directed at the content, organization and experience of mass education in the United States. Not to mention at least some reason to soberly think about the damage that even a few bad teachers or bad educational trends can inflict on students, and how much the memory of such an experience can shape a life–Robin dissolves “bad teaching” into the acid bath of “bad sociality”, but if you’re going to credit how distinctively powerful good or competent teaching is, and how grateful we should be for it, you can’t just wave off how disproportionately serious bad teaching or advising can be.

I also think Robin is underestimating the variance in how different students feel treated even by great, talented, inspiring teachers. The teacher who inspired or excited someone like myself could be more like the teacher who denigrated or discouraged other students. Not necessarily because the teacher meant to do that (though some did) but because of the necessary involvement of teachers in the workings of meritocratic sorting. You can’t give credit to some of Christopher Hayes’ unsettling analysis of meritocratic privilege on one hand without seeing how teachers disrupt the reproduction of privilege (a modestly successful professional cannot simply will a child through the system, no matter how hard they try) and yet also are a key part of the reproduction of privilege on the other. In this sense, teachers good and bad can’t win for losing: they will end up blamed either way for crises in the reproduction and/or transformation of social hierarchies, because they really are involved in the making of the social order. Not involved in everything and anything, as all the overwrought hysterics who continuously scream about the “failure” of American schools like to believe, but neither is it all Mr. Chips and Jaime Escalante either–defending both the great teachers we’ve each had as individuals and the vital contributions of teachers in general doesn’t require sanctifying them as more altruistic than everyone else, or forgetting the structural and contingent problems that they both are victims of and sometimes movers within.

What ultimately has made the criticism of the Chicago strike so odd and irritating is that the critics are so dismissive and arrogant about the chief sticking points in the negotiations, which aren’t really about money. There’s a seeming inability to understand why poorly designed evaluation systems, particularly those that are tied to test results, threaten the very best and most inspiring teachers as much as anyone. What they threaten is not the loss of job security, but the professional discretion and skill of good teachers. You can’t be in favor of clumsy or cookie-cutter evaluations and still claim to be primarily concerned about the quality of teaching in public schools. What might be happening here is less the rage of privileged elites against anyone they deem to be beneath them, and more the rage of upper middle-class professionals who have found their own lives increasingly hemmed in by forms of deprofessionalizing oversight and dumb operant-conditioning gimmickry sold to organizations by snake-oil consultancies. The trick in the next decade is going to be: can we get the river to flow the other direction? Rather than give in to every person who insists that whatever outrages and inefficiencies of 21st Century Taylorism have been inflicted on them must be inflicted on everyone else, we should be trying to claw back generative, productive forms of dignity and autonomy to the working lives of every person.

I’ve been in an interesting conversation at Facebook about steadily rising suicide rates in the US military. Thirty-eight Army soldiers killed themselves in July 2012, the highest monthly rate that the Army has ever recorded. 2012’s grim statistics are just the most recent part of a long-term trend.

What I’ve been asking on Facebook is why Americans are not talking more about whether it is the wars we’re involved in and the sociopolitical context of post-9/11 service that are significantly to blame for this trend. I recognize that serving military, leaders and rank-and-file alike, cannot raise this point without violating the principle of civilian control. “Ours is not to question why”. So when the military sets out to ask, “What can we do about suicide rates”, they can’t raise or even consider the rejoinder, “Don’t send soldiers to be occupiers, don’t fight counter-insurgency wars unless you absolutely must, don’t ask soldiers to be nation-builders, don’t purposefully imagine your wars as endless and without hope of final victory.” If the military turns to experts and pays them for advice, they can’t purchase a product which includes even a discussion of those points.

Which is why it falls to Americans, both citizens and leaders, to step up to the plate and have the conversation that our serving military can’t have. Occupation under the best of circumstances is a peculiarly stressful mission for militaries. It’s much worse when some proportion, maybe most, of the populations in occupied territories hate or resent their occupiers, and worse again when the occupiers don’t know the local languages, don’t understand the local cultures, and have few if any points of historical connection to the places or people where they are deployed.

Two administrations, Republican and Democrat, have proposed, accepted and refined a conceptual apparatus around our current wars that deliberately imagines those wars as global, endless and without hope of resolution. Even the Cold War’s globalism had stated as well as understood limits, all the more so after Vietnam. A soldier enlisting today in the US Army or Marines can reasonably anticipate not just the possibility of multiple deployments to Afghanistan (for all the talk of withdrawal) but to other imaginable theaters of counter-insurgent conflict and occupation. A soldier enlisting today knows that whomever wins in November, we will still be fighting the Global War on Terror in terms which have deviated very little from their initial post-9/11 envisioning. A soldier enlisting today knows that there are many people inside the Beltway who are actively spoiling for a war with Iran, and anyone who has seen military service since 9/11 has to guess at some of the probable contours and consequences of such a conflict. Even before actually seeing service in a GWOT theater, serving military might begin to feel the emotional consequences of this knowledge, particularly if they’re training with or coming to know soldiers and their families who have already endured deployment. We are in a forever war now and there is virtually no one in political leadership who holds out even a faint hope that we might think otherwise about the uses of our military and our role in the world.

A conscript can look at a war and resent the way it’s being fought, question its necessity, complain loudly and long about what has been done to him by someone else. Even if he in the end accepts the necessity of his service. This kind of sentiment shows up in a lot of work about World War II, both by veterans and scholars. It’s a sustaining way to think: we can endure in many ways the emotional pain that others inflict upon us better than we can the consequences of our own decisions.

A volunteer who is surrounded by volunteers has the comfort of knowing they’re involved in a fully shared, universal experience. Whatever comes of it, at least they know that everybody else has to endure it, too.

Our current soldiers have neither comfort to keep them going through the long and endless dark of our current wars. Our forces are volunteer, so in the pain of deployment and loneliness, waiting for the IED with your name on it, trying to guess which hostile stranger’s face means death and which simply wishes you would go home, you have got no one to blame but yourself if you come to wish you weren’t here, weren’t doing this. And you’ve got a code of honor that says you even have to stifle any thought that your leaders–or fellow citizens–are fucking it all up, you have to keep that kind of talk inside your own world. Americans as a whole live in a time of libertarian machismo, we’ve elevated the contract to the status of graven idol. Increasingly our public response to anyone who has agreed to something that they later regret is that it’s their own damn fault, they should have known better, and stop crying to us about it.

Our current soldiers can’t look around and feel they are part of a universal fellowship, a shared sacrifice. They don’t see their whole hometowns there with them. Their units aren’t made up of the scrappy street kid from Brooklyn, the WASP from Boston, the surfer dude from California, the professor’s son from Ann Arbor, the guy whose dad made a fortune in railroad shipping. The US military is really our last, best meritocracy, one of the few American institutions that’s become more egalitarian and fair over time. It’s a model in many ways for the social aspirations that we’ve trashed and lost and forgotten. Inside its boundaries, that is. But outside? Our military is also professionalized and apart. It’s not a mirror of America any longer. It’s not even that most of us don’t serve or imagine serving. It’s that people don’t care much at all about what the military does or endures, beyond increasingly hollow and ritualistic appreciations for our “soldiers abroad”. We send care packages and offer warm appreciations on Facebook, but try asking people where Helmand Province is, or what happened in the last month in southern Afghanistan. Try asking them to remember what happened in Fallujah. Nothing of what has happened or will happen in these wars stays in national consciousness save as a passing, nagging memory. Try asking people what they’re prepared to give up for the sake of these wars. We’re fighting expensive wars and yet most Americans are still a bunch of fucking crybabies about taxes. And try to imagine how it feels to be stuck fighting a painful war of occupation, to feel it likely that there are more of those to come, and to know that no one at home will really care enough to pay attention until there’s some momentary episodic eruption of spectacular visuals or unusual violence.

Historians with a long view might recognize the evolving contours of this situation. It rarely turns out well when a society with imperial commitments makes heavy use of an increasingly professionalized, socially detached military with a warrior ethos and a high degree of skill who feel that their suffering is unappreciated and unrewarded. It is for that reason alone that I sometimes wonder if the most progressive answer to our current wars would be to revive the draft, with absolutely zero exemptions from service.

Whatever the long-term implications, we could at least ask right here, right now, whether the wars we’re fighting, in the way we’ve imagined fighting them, with the people who’ve given their lives over to us to fight with, aren’t a major part of the reason why our soldiers are now as deadly to themselves as any hostile forces they face on a battlefield.

For a portion of my voting life, I was registered as an independent. (I’m presently registered as a Democrat, having switched my registration in 2007.) I’ve never been a “typical” independent, if you go by what the political analysts say, in that independents normally skew very significantly towards Republican candidates. Even in the case of those typical independents, however, I think pollsters sometimes ignore the interior self-fashioning of the suburban, educated, middle-class men who register or identify as independents simply because that seems to make little difference to their voting behavior, and certainly that self-image makes much less difference in most political outcomes than independents themselves like to fantasize about.

The independent, whatever his political skew, is a prominent presence in American public discourse, however, which might explain why both parties try to appeal to independents. Even when they’re not a major swing constituency, they’re the men who write newspaper editorials, who dominate Beltway think-tanks, who like to believe they hold the trademark on being Serious People. “Independence”, in this sense, is a latter-day mutation of the masculinity of rugged independence, a demesne of folkloric power in the mythology of American identity.

I know better in more ways than one to set up my own homestead squarely in that territory, but I do understand its appeal. Independence is a fantasy about power, but it is also a fantasy about integrity and honor, in fact, about the possible co-existence of the two things. Independent masculinity hates the idea that power is inevitable as a curse, a crime, or a distribution. (Which is why independents recoil so strongly at both the argument that racial or economic power is the consequence of structures that precede agency and that the independent is implicated in as much as everyone else, or the postmodern view of power as circulating, ubiquitous and morally blurred.) The independent wants power to reside in circumstantial challenges followed by monumental choices. The independent imagines the unfolding of history as drama, and self-lovingly casts himself as a lead actor.

“Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny”. But C.S. Lewis’ Uncle Andrew, in The Magician’s Nephew, is an important reminder that the mythological space of independent masculinity is a densely inhabited one, particularly in American cultural history. The independent mentality loves to dwell on failures as much as successes, on men who stumble or choose greed and dishonor when they get the call. Moreover, the independent often likes to believe that he can appreciate or connect with another “choosing independent” even if they don’t like or agree with the other man’s choices, as long as the other actor seems to have honor and integrity, to be genuine and sincere in his conviction. And–I suppose this is obvious–as long as the other man has acted on his own. A man who is just following orders, doing the bidding of another, is a slavish devotee of a group or movement or collective, need not apply. In Nixon Agonistes, Gary Wills captures (and brilliantly skewers) this mindset among the high-minded “liberal” professoriate of the late 1960s-1970s, in their fastidious belief that they were above and beyond ideology.

This is a space that has Atticus Finch and Dr. Thomas Stockmann in it as well as Howard Roark and Charles Foster Kane: it’s not simply a libertarian or megalomaniacal domain. At times, it’s an ethos and affect that many who do not fully drink the Kool-Aid nevertheless admire or find attractive, and it may spill over into the way that many of us imagine ourselves. I feel the romantic pull of this mode of self-presentation most strongly when I look at figures like Robert Hughes, for example.

Which is why understanding the plasticity (and hard outer boundaries) of the independent imaginary is important in relationship to Paul Ryan. I think it’s true that his nomination is a bid for the approval of independents, not just overtly self-identified religious right or Tea Party members, and progressives need to take that gambit seriously. Even if independents of this stripe aren’t numerically significant, their affection can pay off in sycophantic profiles and op-ed columns, with whatever effect those have on actual swing voters. At the same time, independents are a fussy lot and the tides of their sentiments can be fierce and unpredictable. Casting someone as an independent is often the prelude to a fall, particularly when that person is pegged as a follower of a rigid ideology or conversely as someone who changes positions when it is expedient to do so.

I’ve long been skeptical about the strongest claims made about the consequences of framing effects in public media and discourse. Not claims about the phenomenon itself, which is very real, but about arguments by George Lakoff and others who hold that conscious manipulation of frames by elites or groups, resulting in sociological and political realignment, is relatively easy to accomplish if you approach it with sufficient resources and technical know-how. How individuals and communities and whole cultures read and interpret frames, what makes a given frame variably credible or powerful, and what moves or changes a narrative of this kind all strike me as inextricably complicated and not in anyone’s simple control.

But there’s another side to framing, and that has to do with the aesthetics and ethics of news and public discourse. Whether a biased news report actually successfully controls or mobilizes members of the public in some direction is one question. Whether such a news report is interesting or engaging to read is another–and that’s a pertinent question for the economic survival of journalism. If an article in a newspaper can be boiled down to a press release for a strongly self-interested institution or group that is trying to control the framing of an issue, then that article is easily substituted for. You can get that from a blog, an email, an advertisement, a clip on YouTube.

To be worth paying for, reportage has to be something more than a transcript of a frame. It doesn’t matter if a reporter is conscious of being a mouthpiece or not. A front page of framing statements is a front page I can have for free via my RSS feed.

Let’s take two examples. First, many folks are pointing out that there is nothing mysterious about the motivations of the shooter at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin: he was an avowed follower of an ideology that would encourage his actions. Coverage by many mainstream media outlets has focused instead on the search for a “specific motive”. This is a classic framing statement: a white domestic terrorist needs a “specific psychological motive” because there is an assumption that such a person “normally” doesn’t commit mass murder for an ideological reason. A non-white killer who professes an ideology that justifies mass murder, on the other hand, is treated as reducible to their ideology, with no need for a specific psychological or intersubjective explanation for their actions. This is a narrative assumption that I don’t think most reporters are consciously adopting or manipulating: its roots lie deep in American racial and political consciousness. But note that either way you slice it, journalists who let this frame overwhelm their coverage are delivering a lousy product. I think you can make a good case that we always want to know the human details behind why a murderer, even an ideologically-driven one, decides to commit murder. But in that sense, Mohamed Atta is as interesting and compelling a character study as Wade Michael Page. Cut the narrative in the other direction, and their ideologies are as textured and humanly complex as each other. The journalist’s value, in either case, is not in acting as a mouthpiece to let the public consciousness of (some) Americans shine through the tissue paper of the front page. It’s to create information, to inquire, to get at the details. Either give me the human, personal details about every murderer and every victim, or give me the detailed skinny on every political community mobilized around a vision of hatred and violence.

A different and more conscious case of framing appears on the front page of today’s New York Times. The story as written reports rather straightforwardly that an espionage-driven “shadow war” between Iran and Israel is beginning to resemble the same kinds of conflicts during the Cold War, with covert actions including assassinations, dirty tricks, subversion and so on. But the front page of the story concentrates entirely on Iran as the only aggressor and entirely quotes unnamed Israeli sources. Other sources (“European”) are reported to be skeptical about whether Iran is actually responsible for these actions, but the article reports that they have self-interested reasons for expressing such skepticism. Only later do we get named experts, who keep the focus on the question whether Iran and Hezbollah are actually responsible for a variety of incidents. We’re well into the article before anyone (in this case, the former head of Mossad) concedes that if this is a “shadow war”, there are actions on two sides. At which point we get a very brief recounting of the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists and no accounting of the increasing use of cyberattacks against Iranian targets, which seems somewhat relevant to another story breaking today of government-linked cyberattacks against Lebanese banks.

Meaning, the really interesting story here is buried way down. It’s not part of how the article is described, headlined, sold or organized. What made covert war in the Cold War a source of great human interest over time was that it was a morally complex domain even for its most ardent proponents and supporters, and that this complexity was in personal and collective terms not limited to one side or the other. When I read Larry Devlin’s Chief of Station Congo, one of the things that struck me about it was that his defense of American actions there was always accompanied by acknowledgement of the moral ugliness and ambiguity of covert conflict for everyone involved. That’s from someone defending this kind of activity. Critics from all sorts of ideological perspectives have been far harsher, but even they tend to recognize that the human intricacies and moral questions are also intriguing. A good story, in other words.

But the Times story is not interested in either the policy implications or the moral questions or the human complexities. It’s mouthpiecing for the reporter’s sources within the intelligence services of Israel and the United States. If there’s a shadow war, write about it all from the beginning of the story. Make that the narrative. Because it’s the totality of that war that raises the questions that a reader might want to talk about with others. Are covert actions risky because they change the understood rules of relations between states, whether in terms of cyberattacks or assassinations? What’s the moral difference between assassinating a nuclear scientist and a bomb in a diplomatic car? (Even the former head of Mossad seems to acknowledge that’s a needle that has to be threaded.) Why is it that “Iran and Hezbollah thrive on plausible deniability” but Israel and the United States do not, even though they haven’t taken official credit for assassinating nuclear scientists or planting viruses in industrial infrastructure?

The point here is not parity or “fair and balanced” treatment. It’s that the story demands something more than just letting some authorized leakers treat the paper as a framing device, letting the reporters decide without having to say as much who they think we should hear from and who is not worth hearing from. Even if they can’t cultivate confidential sources inside Iran’s intelligence community or inside Hezbollah (but they should) surely there must be people in the US or Israeli or EU national security policy community who think that a “shadow war” is a policy choice worth debating, that the dangers of retaliation and escalation are issues quite aside from the moral questions such actions raise. We don’t get a story here, we don’t get a debate, we don’t get anything but rather transparent attempts to make a frame that would be just as transparent if the NYT reprinted an article from the Tehran Times on the subject. Now I grant you that in this case, it’s a bit harder to just pick up what Israeli and American intelligence sources think about this “shadow war” by reading Mossad’s Twitter feed, but the value-added of journalism still has to be more than a reporter handing over his column inches to valued sources who believe they need to get a narrative frame in place in public discourse. Here at least the last ten years should have taught us that there can indeed be consequences when editors and reporters subcontract themselves to the needs of political leaders and their national-security advisors–but leaving aside the consequences, I just want a better, more interesting, richer story written by someone who has a cannier, smarter sense of politics and human nature. I don’t want to spend the first ten paragraphs waiting for an entire shoe store worth of merchandise to drop.