Category: Political Science

What both forms of populism share is a tendency to treat virtue as a fixed property of groups and policy as a way of redistributing power from the disfavored to the favored. When I said we needed “a liberalism that builds,” David Dayen, the editor of The American Prospect, responded that “we need a liberalism that builds power” and that the way to get it is for the government “actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”

Every policy, in this telling, has two goals. One is the goal of the policy or the project; perhaps you’re trying to decarbonize the economy or build affordable housing or increase competition in the market for hearing aids. But the other is the redistribution of power among groups: Does this policy leave unions stronger or weaker? Environmental justice groups? Corporations?

Under the populist theory of power, bad policy can be — and often is — justified as good politics. In California, the California Environmental Quality Act is defended by unions that use it to “greenmail” all manner of projects. CEQA is meant to protect the environment, but the threat of unending litigation can be used to win non-environmental concessions on virtually any building project in California.

Here is the full NYT  piece, interesting throughout, for instance:

My view of power is more classically liberal. In his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” Edmund Fawcett describes it neatly: “Human power was implacable. It could never be relied on to behave well. Whether political, economic or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.”

Worth a ponder.

Now that the dust has settled at least temporarily, a few readers have asked me for comment on the recent clash.  The events are difficult to understand, in part because of rampant misinformation and also because of genuine continuing uncertainty as to what happened. Nonetheless we do know two things:

1. The two sides whacked each other a fair amount, more than usual.

2. Neither sides resorted to nukes.

So in its simplest terms, we now know/suppose that the threshold for nuclear use is higher than we earlier might have estimated.  Since very little was settled, the rational, game-theoretic presumption is that the two countries, in the future, will whack each other some more.

Yet there is a second-order effect.  The more they whack each other with non-nuclear means, the more the weaker party (usually Pakistan, in this context) will feel tempted to lower the nuclear threshold, if only stochastically (this can be done, among other ways, by exercising imperfect control over factions in the armed forces).  One way to put this point involves the Lucas critique — one instance of whacking never really establishes what the future nuclear threshold will be.

So there is more future whacking, and continuing and perhaps even growing uncertainty about where the nuclear threshold lies.

An institutionally more detailed take is possible, but perhaps this “crude” game-theoretic analysis captures some of the essentials.  If you want to enrich the analysis, I would consider the variable “what we learned about the reaction functions of America and China,” although the full stories here are not yet out.  The same is true for “what we learned about the possibly non-unitary nature of Pakistani governance.”