The Calm Before... Something?

So, there's been something very strange happening recently. For the last twenty years, that is. Specifically, we've now gone five Presidential election cycles in which the highest percentage of electoral votes any candidate has gotten was 70.4%, and no Presidential candidate has won a popular vote margin of more than 8.5%. This is only the second time this has happened, ever; that was from 1876 through 1900, when the biggest margin was 6.1% and the biggest share of the EVs was 65.3%, both in 1900. In fact, from 1880 through 1888, three consecutive Presidential cycles were decided by less than one percent of popular vote, and were within a 60-40 split in the Electoral College. Outside of that period and the current period, the longest we've gone with elections as close as the ones we've been seeing was... one election. That's right, there were no consecutive elections meeting both these criteria since the formation of the Republican party except for two exceptionally long competitive bursts.

There's something else, though: the landscape of Presidential elections has been absurdly stable these last twenty years. Specifically, thirty-one out of fifty states, plus DC, have voted for the same party in each of our last five elections. A further nine have voted for one party four of five times. Only ten states have been properly "swing," dividing their vote as evenly as you could ask for (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, and Florida, of which five are products of Clinton's being a Southerner). Overall, the fifty-one state-like regions that have voted in the past five elections have voted for their preferred party an average of 87% of the time; the similar stat for the post-Civil War era is only 83%. I have no idea if that's statistically significant, but this rough gauge of the stability of voting patterns suggests that we've been at least as set in our ways as that era.

I have a hypothesis to explain this, of course. Basically, I think that American politics, and American partisan politics, has spent a lot of time being unnatural, or not in equilibrium to put it somewhat more precisely. At the Founding, we had one giant cancerous problem, slavery (on which, more at some point in the future when I have time for a long rant), and two parties, Federalist and Democratic-Republican. But the Federalists became deeply personally unpopular, and the D-R's adopted most of their policies, killing that party system. Then we had the Second Party System, Jacksonian Democrats vs. Whigs, but this was the period when the Unions began to come apart. Actually, in some ways the partisan politics of this era were quite competitive, with five straight cycles with popular vote margins less than 7% from 1836 through 1852, but the Electoral College made a lot of those margins appear much bigger. Then there was this thing called the Civil War, and then we went into one period of natural equilibrium: Democrats were, basically, the party of the rural South, and Republicans were the party of the urban north, with the civil-rights implications that came with that, and they were both perfectly happy being that. No problems, no need to mix it up. Then came the Progressive Era, which was just weird in that the two parties didn't really disagree about all that much. Then were the 20s, when the Democrats just kept getting shellacked, but which were basically the same equilibrium of the late 19th century, just shifted +20 toward the GOP.

But then a couple of things happened, and I'm not talking about the Depression. Al Smith, a Democrat, finally managed to run an urbane campaign that appealed to, say, New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Simultaneously, I believe (though I can't now find confirmation of this, which is odd), the Republican convention voted down a resolution condemning the KKK, and Herbert Hoover definitely started the forerunner of the Southern Strategy, ditching black officials to win Southern white votes. The result of all of this was that the old equilibrium was disturbed, and as it happened, permanently so. Roosevelt's tent was big enough to fit urban blacks and Southern whites together, but that couldn't last, and when the natural tug of a two-party system toward competitive balance re-asserted itself, civil rights managed to be a winning proposition among Democrats.

The old equilibrium was dead; Southern white racists would never truly be comfortable in the Democratic party unless they could exorcise this new component. And they never could. Democrats walked irrevocably out of the shadow of states' rights and into the light of human rights, and Republicans filled the void. This all happened in stages: Strom winning the Deep South as a Dixiecrat in '48, Goldwater taking the Deep South for the GOP for the first time since Reconstruction in '64, Wallace in '68 and Nixon's Southern Strategy in '72, and then Reagan, Bush and Bush just plain winning the South, and that was all there was to it. Except, of course, that the Dixiecrat wing held on for a hell of a lot longer in Congress, dying a final death only in 1994 (that's what that election was all about!), and the Democratic dominance in nominal party ID and in governorships in the South may only have died this past year, though the former at least has been a pure fiction for over a decade.

The result of this gradual sloughing off of the Dixiecrat wing of the Democrats and the subsequent filling-in of that vacuum by Republicans, which was then accompanied by a sloughing-off of the Rockefeller wing of the Republicans and a filling-in of that vacuum by Democrats, is that we no longer have cognitive dissonance in our parties. For forty years, neither party really knew what it was. Were Democrats the party of Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey? Or Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and conservative committee chairs? Who knew? It was both; it couldn't decide. As for Republicans: Rockefeller vs. Goldwater. It couldn't decide. This was an unnatural state: we had two supposedly national political organizations that had no particular governing ideology between them, that did not represent genuine ideological coalitions.

Well, that's changed now. We know who the parties are. Republicans are the party of corporate interests, libertarian and/or small-government interests, military interests, conservative religious interests, and racist interests. Democrats are the party of worker's interests, social-democratic interests, internationalist interests, secular and/or culturally progressive interests, and minority interests. So we're at equilibrium, both parties know what they are, what they want to be, and they are both competitive on that basis. So there's no reason for them to change the formula; thus, the second Great Competitive Era of American politics.

Will it end? Yes, definitely before too long and possibly sooner than that. Sarah Palin could receive a drubbing in 2012; we're due for a proper landslide. Or, theoretically, the Republicans could genuinely split themselves in 2012, with Palin running as a third-partier. Or we could have another close election in 2012, and maybe even in 2016. It feels to me like the Republican party's ideological coalition is stranger bedfellows than the Democrats', but they also are happier to engage in blind partisanship against a common enemy, at least for the moment. What I do know is that being a party that routinely captures a whopping 35% of Hispanic votes in a decent year is not sustainable long-term. This means that eventually something will have to change, and the current holding pattern of the Presidential electoral map will shift again. I just don't know when.

Why The Mets Would Be Stupid To Trade Jose Reyes

There's a rumor that the Mets are looking to trade Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, and Jenrry Mejia to the Diamondbacks for Justin Upton and Stephen Drew. Now, that's such a silly trade that it probably isn't worth discussing; numerous other sources have said that the Mets want three or four players of at least AAAA caliber in exchange for just Reyes, as well they should. But there is discussion that the Mets are interested in trading Reyes... as a salary dump. Now, setting aside the fact that Jose Reyes is my favorite player in the game, there would be good reasons to trade Reyes, if you are getting back something just as good, which is somewhat unlikely. I think that there might be a situation where the exchange rate at which it would make sense for the Mets to trade Reyes is higher than the exchange rate at which it would make sense for any other team to take him, i.e. I think he has some value-added as a Met in much the same way that a certain other pathetic excuse for a shortstop I could mention has considerable value-added while he stays with that certain other team.

But trading Reyes in a salary dump just does not make sense, full stop. Yes, the Mets have a whole lot of cash locked up in nine players this year, and thus have essentially no room to maneuver. And yes, Reyes' contract nominally expires at the end of this year. And yes, he's being paid $11 million this year. But you know what? Very little of that matters. First of all, Reyes will be more than happy to sign a multi-year extension with the Mets after, or during, this upcoming year. He likes being a Met, and I think he wants always to be a Met. And unlike a certain other pathetic excuse for a shortstop, I don't think he is particularly likely to insist upon being paid two or three times his fair market value. And second of all, a huge amount of all of that money comes off the books after this year, including the three supposedly "albatross" contracts, Perez, Castillo, and Beltran. The Mets will have room to maneuver starting in 2012. Do you really want to not have Reyes anymore long-term just because we were squeezed this year? Nobody expects the Mets to contend this year. The point of 2011 is a rebuilding year; if we have a solid, mid-to-high 80s wins season, people will be thrilled. Then it's on to 2012, and trying to win a championship. At that point, any short-term salary dump motive to trade Reyes will have vanished into the mists of time, and we'll be left regretting it.

So trading Jose Reyes in an attempt to cut salary would be a not-particularly-effective way of trying to Win Now, in 2011, by sacrificing big-time long-term. Bad idea. Bad, bad idea.

James Madison was Right, Wrong, and Righter than He Knew

In Federalist No. 10, one of the most famous pieces of political philosophy ever written by an American, James Madison argued that the influence of factions on political society would be best controlled by a large nation, a federal union like that of the United States. It was an argument to counter the conventional wisdom that democracy couldn't scale to a large country like the U.S. Of course, now it's 200 years later, so we have a little bit of evidence as to whether Madison was right or not. My hypothesis is that he was right, wrong, and even more right than he thought he was.

The Spirit of the Constitution

One of the big, meta-debates in constitutional interpretation is whether there is such a thing as the spirit of the Constitution, and if so, how it should be used in interpretation. I believe that the Scaliaites are the ones who like to say that, no, there is no spirit to the document, there is only the words (except that those words sometimes contain rather surprising meanings because that's what someone things the Founders thought they meant). I think they're wrong, of course, and I wish here to give my view of where the text of the Constitution invites the spirit of the document in, what that spirit is, and why the spirit of the Constitution is one that can evolve with time, in a certain sense.

Why We Are All Dead In The Long Run

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again. - John Maynard Keynes

This gets quoted, mainly, as "in the long run we are all dead," a retort whenever an economist starts talking about the long run or the idea that recessions etc. don't really affect long-term growth trends. He was, specifically, attacking the idea that inflation would just naturally control itself "in the long run." I'm sitting in economics class right now, listening about the long-term relationship between nominal prices and the real economy (i.e. the same thing as Keynes was talking about), and I think I see pretty clearly why we are all dead in the long run. It's not so much that everyone dies etc. but that we will never get to the long run.

The idea of "the long run" is that, once you let the economy alone for a decade or two everything evens out, and there aren't any noticeable changes in, say, the money supply/the price level, everything adjusts so that, yes, it really is just like you doubled all dollars and didn't change anything. But think about the crucial part of that: "if there aren't any noticeable changes." There are always noticeable changes. Stuff happens, all the time. There are real-world events, technological discoveries, oil shocks, stupid Republican policies, wars, etc. So yes, eventually we will hit the Long Run of the Great Recession of 2008-09. Eventually we will reach the time at which the effects of this particular shock have vanished into the past. But by then, some new factor will be disturbing the equilibrium, and we'll be in the Short Run vis-a-vis it. If you sit on a tropical island and see one particular hurricane sweep across the ocean where you are, yes, you can say, well, the storm will pass soon, and the ocean will be calm again. But if you consider the weather as a whole, you know that, hey, there might be another hurricane a week later.

So since we never really get our decade or century or whatever of clear-skies economics, it makes no sense to think primarily of the long run. It's always the short run somewhere; do you know where your children are? And each time it is the Short Run, there will be real suffering in the present that can either be exacerbated or ameliorated. Yes, long-run growth is an important thing, and policies that encourage long-run growth are a good thing (though they should keep environmental concepts like sustainability in mind). But the long run is unpredictable and rarely all smooth sailing, whereas current troubles are immediate and concrete, as is the real suffering they cause. Attacking the suffering in the present that we know for certain is happening is and should be the first priority of economics.

The Sorting Hat of Politics

Yes, that's right: the sorting hat of politics. It is, after all, the day of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1's coming out, and I am obsessed with politics, so the sorting hat of politics it is. And what I mean by that is that I will go through a list of US political figures, both current and historical, and declare which Houses I think they have the most affinity to. Two notes: first, I'm not putting people 100% into a given House. Instead, I'll give an overall House choice, in bold, and then list what percent share of that person's soul, so to speak, each House has. Second, my interpretation of the various Houses is going to be slightly non-canonical, conforming perfectly neither to the Sorting Hat's songs nor to the actual distribution of personalities amongst the Houses. The song traits focus on primarily the following: Gryffindor, bravery and chivalry; Hufflepuff, loyalty and hard work; Ravenclaw, intelligence and curiosity; Slytherin, cunning and ambition. On the other hand, the real-life traits are more like this: Hufflepuff, boring and bland; Ravenclaw, also fairly bland, tending toward airy; Gryffindor, Being The Good Guys; Slytherin, Being The Bad Guys, and racism. I am not going to treat Being The Good Guys or Being The Bad Guys as controlling. My classification scheme will work roughly as follows:

• Gryffindor: Heroism, assertiveness, sweeping efforts to make the world a better place. Includes the idea that one can apply that aggressive pursuit of good in a misguided way and do much harm.
• Hufflepuff: Some combination of blandness, ordinariness, and the "neutral competence" image. Also with a flavor of populism and/or modesty.
• Ravenclaw: Intellectualism, thoughtfulness, etc. I actually think Ravenclaw's one of the simplest Houses, and it's also clearly the best (though I won't apply it in a good = Ravenclaw way).
• Slytherin: Cunning, self-advancement, and underhandedness. Racism included but not dispositive; that is, some racists may have traits that outweigh the pure racism. Ambition is more or less discounted, since essentially all politicians are ambitious.

Actual classifications coming below the fold.

Musings on Citizens United

Earlier this semester we here at Brown had a lecture/debate/not-really-much-of-a-debate about the Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, the case that struck down prohibitions on corporate electioneering. As I said, it wasn't much of a debate; Larry Lessig, the nominally pro-campaign finance restrictions speaker, stated explicitly that he agreed with the Court. And the general consensus of the speakers, including Lessig, his opponent Bradley Smith, and Professor Steven Calabresi, who led an unpacking discussion a few days later, was that the Court had been right, corporations have a full complement of rights including free speech rights, and that the solution to speech is not to silence that speech but rather to talk back. And at the time, I was at least borderline convinced by that argument. (Professor Calabresi also argued that one good solution would be a robust anonymity regime, and while the anonymous spending of the elections seems to argue against that proposal even in theory, I might point out that these donations/ads weren't anonymous to the politicians; that would be the key point.)

But I had a thought today that, I think, shows why the argument is an incorrect one. I, along with some others, asked the question, "If the government creates corporations, why is it required to give them free speech rights?" That is to say, since corporations exist only on the whims of the government, can they really be said to have rights against it? The response was, look, we give corporations other Bill of Rights rights, like 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. But there's a big difference.

What is a corporation? It is a creature of property. It is an agglomeration of property, a web of contracts given legal force by the government which has been found convenient to picture as a kind of legal person. But it is fundamentally property. It is not a sentient being. It cannot be said to have natural rights of the Lockian variety, if you're partial to Lockian natural rights, since, in the Lockian state of nature, no corporation would exist in any binding sense. So why do corporations have 4th Amendment rights? Because those are rights pertaining to property, and property is what corporations are all about. There would be no point in creating a corporation if you didn't give it property rights, so when the government creates a corporation, assuming it is a reasonable and/or competent government, it will of course grant them property rights. If it doesn't have property rights, it can't bloody well be a creature of property, can it?

But the right to freedom of speech, and especially the right to political speech, is not a property right. Freedom of expression, as in the right to make art or publish a book or have public discussions about ideas, could be argued to be a natural right; again, corporations cannot have natural rights, since they are not natural persons. What freedom of speech rights are, and again, what political speech rights especially are, is political rights. They fall in that great category of rights we ensure because they are a part of the democratic political process. The most basic point of free speech rights is to allow citizens (!) to participate in their own self-governance.

And a corporation does not, or should not, have political rights. They cannot vote. They do not count in apportionment. They may not run for nor hold office. And they should not have these rights. Why? They are not a party to the social contract. The great principle of democracy is that all human beings who live under the jurisdiction of a government should be able to participate in the administration of that government. The people all make an agreement with one another to waive some portion of their natural rights, and in exchange they get a government that can better protect their other natural rights, and that they get to participate in. That's Locke's logic, and since the Declaration of Independence is almost plagiarized from Locke I think it's a reasonable basis to go on in evaluating our government. And corporations play no part in this process. They do not exist when the social contract is made; they have no right to participate in the government formed by that social contract. And one of the most important ways to participate is by speaking.

A corporation is not a political being, it is a propertied being. It is no party to the sovereignty of the government, it has no right to participate in the government. As such, the claim that corporations have, or must have, freedom of political speech is ludicrous.